I explore how many within modern industrial societies currently understand, manage, and respond to their emotional suffering. I argue that this understanding and management of suffering has radically altered in the last 30 years, creating a new model of suffering, “the negative model” (suffering is purposeless), which has largely replaced the “positive model” (suffering is purposeful) that prevailed in the 18th and 19th centuries. This shift has been hastened by what I call the “rationalization of suffering”—namely, the process (...) by which suffering is predominantly now understood in biological and psychiatric terms rather than in religious, philosophical, or moral. This process accompanied the great forces of secularization, medicalization unleashed at the enlightenment—forces gaining their modern expression through psychiatry, the behavioral psychotherapies, the happiness industries, as well as through aggressive market, individualistic, medical, and positivistic ideas and movements. This shift has entailed many socio/cultural implications important for anthropologists to explore further. (shrink)

This paper examines how people anticipate negative emotion when faced with an uncertain outcome and try to manage their expectation. While extant research streams remain equivocal on whether managing expectation always succeeds, this research examines situations in which setting a low expectation can have an adverse emotional impact and ways to alleviate this negative emotional consequence. Using goal setting and false-feedback paradigm, we show that those who set low goals to manage expectation can end up feeling more disappointed (...) than those who set high goals (study 1), but this negative impact can be avoided when goals are reminded at feedback and when individuals are made aware of the inaccuracies in forecasting affect or are reminded of their initial goal (studies 1 and 2). (shrink)

Affective shifts have been linked to work attitudes and behaviors recently, but previous researches only focused on affective shift during work, with little attention to affective shifts outside work. Conservation of resources and personality system interaction theories are used to design a 2-week daily dairy study. Participants report how affective shifts outside work affect their subsequent-day task performance, emotional exhaustion, and CWB. As expected, findings indicate that shifts in affect outside work meaningfully impact job performance and work attitudes. That (...) is, when both positive and negative affect upshift outside work, employees perform their tasks better but also experience increased emotional exhaustion. Practical implications and limitations are discussed. (shrink)

Eight structural criteria are developed as part of a dialogical method by testing them against seven examples of arguments from negative consequences. The aim is to provide a method for evaluating the arguments in the examples as fallacious or not. It is shown that any method that can be satisfactorily used to evaluate such examples needs to be based on two techniques. The first is careful application of argumentation underlying shifts from one type of dialog to another schemes. The (...) second is consideration of contextual factors concerning. (shrink)

Along the same line as that in Ono (Ann Pure Appl Logic 161:246–250, 2009), a proof-theoretic approach to Glivenko theorems is developed here for substructural predicate logics relative not only to classical predicate logic but also to arbitrary involutive substructural predicate logics over intuitionistic linear predicate logic without exponentials QFLe. It is shown that there exists the weakest logic over QFLe among substructural predicate logics for which the Glivenko theorem holds. Negative translations of substructural predicate logics are studied by (...) using the same approach. First, a negative translation, called extended Kuroda translation is introduced. Then a translation result of an arbitrary involutive substructural predicate logics over QFLe is shown, and the existence of the weakest logic is proved among such logics for which the extended Kuroda translation works. They are obtained by a slight modification of the proof of the Glivenko theorem. Relations of our extended Kuroda translation with other standard negative translations will be discussed. Lastly, algebraic aspects of these results will be mentioned briefly. In this way, a clear and comprehensive understanding of Glivenko theorems and negative translations will be obtained from a substructural viewpoint. (shrink)

Peer review of manuscripts has recently become a subject of academic research and ethical debate. Critics of the review process argue that it is a means by which powerful members of the scientific community maintain their power, and achieve their personal and communal aspirations, often at others' expense. This qualitative study aimed to generate a rich, empirically‐grounded understanding of the process of manuscript review, with a view to informing strategies to improve the review process. Open‐ended interviews were carried out with (...) 35 journal editors and peer reviewers in the United Kingdom, the USA and Australia. It is clear from this research that relations of power and epistemic authority in manuscript review are complex and dynamic, and may have positive and negative features, and that even where power is experienced as controlling, restrictive and illegitimate, it can also be resisted. In conclusion, the manuscript review process is best thought of not in terms of simple dominance of reviewers and editors over authors, but rather as a shifting “net” of power relations. These complex power relations need to be understood if reviewers are to be encouraged to participate in the process and to do so in the the most ethical and effective manner. (shrink)

BackgroundSome persons conceived with donor gametes react negatively when they found their birth via donor conception. They request access to information about and seek to communicate with the donor. However, some countries mandate donor anonymity. Other countries allow donor-conceived persons to access donor information, but they can only use this access if their parents have disclosed donor conception to them. We investigated a thorny issue of donor conception: whether donor conception should be shifted from an anonymous basis to a non-anonymous (...) basis.MethodsWe review the issues and concerns regarding donor conception. We then consider the impact of direct-to-consumer genetic testing on donor conception, as well as the influence of donor conception on offspring’s identity and the potential of different types of donors. To discuss the future policy of donor conception, the policies on the anonymity of gamete donors were investigated using publicly-available documents in 15 countries.ResultsThe aim of mandating donor anonymity is to protect the privacy of the donor and intended parents. However, the diffusion of direct-to-consumer genetic testing may make it impossible to maintain anonymity. Birth via donor conception shapes the offspring’s identity, and the donor may further influence the development of offspring’s identity through communications. It remains important to disclose donor conception to donor-conceived offspring and to provide them with donor information. However, that information might be insufficient for some donor-conceived persons. Here are benefits to having open-identity donors and known donors. Such donors can make an agreement with the parents regarding future communication with the offspring, although both sides should respect privacy. Subsequent counseling for all parties involved can result in better tripartite communication agreements.ConclusionsIn sum, ethical and practical issues that complicate donor anonymity are driving a shift to non-anonymous donor conception, in which all parties come to a communication agreement. To pave the way for such a donor conception system, transitional measures can be put into place. For countries that already adopted non-anonymous donor conception, ensuring the communication agreements is important to protect the rights of parents, donor, and offspring. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the question of whether there is justification for regulations that place limits on food choices. I begin by discussing Sarah Conly’s recent defense of paternalist limits on food choice. I argue that Conly’s argument is flawed because it assumes a particular conception of health that is not universally shared. I examine this conception of health in some detail, and I argue that we need to shift our focus from individual behaviors and lifestyle to the (...) broader social and environmental context. Such a shift allows us to see the ways in which industry practices are negatively impacting our well-being (a broader concept than “health”). I argue that state regulatory activity surrounding the conditions under which food is grown, processed, marketed, and sold needs to be strengthened. As a result, there are likely to be some indirect limitations on food choice. These indirect limitations are justified, but regulations in which the goal is to change individual behavior or lifestyle are not. (shrink)

The present social-historical moment is marked by a sharp divide, a harrowing ‘communication breakdown’ between subject and object, between humanity and nature, between humanity and itself. This state of affairs pleads for the (re-)elaboration of a consciousness that resonates critically with the social, political and cultural realities of its time. This paper studies the lessons that can be drawn in this regard from the intersection between, on the one hand, Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ and his idea of an historically (...) adequate consciousness, and, on the other, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ and his conception of the historically effected consciousness. The paper opens with a concise reconstruction of Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ as a critical response to instrumental rationality that borrows insights from radical historicism. The focus then shifts to Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ which is read as a similar type of protest against instrumental reason that privileges dialogical forms of enculturation. Finally, the paper closes with some suggestive yet inconclusive reflections on some important elements of convergence/divergence between the two thinkers, notably, their theorisations of immanent and transcended critique, the role they ascribe to tradition and language vis-à-vis experience, and the special place of ‘mimesis’ in it. Overall, the argument is made that a ‘negative hermeneutics’ may be what is needed to fashion new interpretations of the world, to foster alternative ways of thinking about and being in it, which, pace Marx, go hand in hand with its transformation – or, perhaps more aptly nowadays, the mere feat of sparing it. (shrink)

This Article traces the trajectory of negotiated rulemaking within American administrative law. The popularity of negotiated rulemaking - among scholars, politicians, and regulators - has waxed and waned since its start in the 1980s. This Article describes and assesses these shifts, charting the birth of negotiated rulemaking, its incorporation into the APA, and its infrequent use in recent years. In mapping the rise and fall of negotiated rulemaking, we focus on two particular critiques - that it violates normative commitments to (...) expertise and rationality in bureaucratic decision making, and that it fails to deliver on its promises of faster rulemaking and less litigation. This Article contends that the first critique is overblown and that the second is true in some instances but not in others. We argue that negotiated rulemaking is most valuable when the appropriate negotiating parties can be easily identified, when they are likely to make concessions and build rapport with each other, and when traditional methods of rulemaking have become ossified. (shrink)

Japan's remarkable economic success especially from the 1960s to the 1980s has attracted extensive worldwide attention. However, the world's admiration has plummeted since the 1990s, when the Bubble Economy burst, bringing on chronic stagnation. Since then, the world has regarded the Japanese economy less as a desirable model and more as an evident failure with many lessons for other economies. These external judgments, positive and negative, have also affected how the Japanese perceive their own economy. This article reviews how (...) these domestic and international perceptions of Japan's economy have varied. It situates the companion articles by Hwang (2012) and Harada (2012) in the historical context of studies of the Japanese economy. This article especially discusses one recurring fixation that muddles comprehension of factors underpinning Japan's economic success and failure: the tendency to overestimate characteristics that supposedly are specific to Japan and different from other market-oriented economies. From the 1960s through the 1980s, scholars, commentators, policy-makers, and the public insisted these characteristics were singular and significant contributors to Japan's remarkable economic development. Since the 1990s, they have considered them the root causes of Japan's remarkable stagnation. Both are exaggerations. Although some singularly Japanese attributes perhaps contributed to Japan's economic ascent and decline, it is equally plausible they did not. It is more likely that poorly conceived and executed macroeconomic policies, especially monetary policy, had greater influence on Japan's post-1990s stagnation. (shrink)

The idea of negative Platonism, first formulated by Jan Patočka in the early 1950s, can be understood as an interpretation of the history of philosophy, with particular reference to its Greek beginnings, as well as a strategy for critical engagement with the metaphysical tradition and a reformulation of central phenomenological themes. Patočka reconstructs the Greek road to metaphysics as a shift from a non-objectifying comprehension of the world as a totality to a quest for systematic knowledge of ultimate (...) reality. In light of this reclaimed background, he then proposes a new reading of Plato: the realm of ideas, separate from empirical reality, becomes a symbol of human freedom, understood as an ability to transcend the world and in so doing grasp it as a totalizing horizon. The concept of freedom thus links a submerged theme of metaphysics to more explicit concerns of contemporary thought. (shrink)

One of the central problems arising from just the descriptive aspect of Kuhn's theory of scientific development by revolutions concerns the problem of generality. Is Kuhn's theory general enough to encompass the development of all the sciences, including both the natural sciences and the social sciences? The answer to this question is no. It is argued that this negative answer is due not to the nature of the sciences themselves but to the nature of Kuhn's theory and, in particular, (...) its local and reductionistic perspective. First steps toward the construction of a more global and more pluralistic descriptive theory of scientific development are taken. The development of significant episodes in the history of sciences other than physics and chemistry are considered. The immediate goals are to correct the narrow base from which Kuhn starts, to show how some of his basic ideas might be preserved, and to indicate how a theory of types would proceed. (shrink)

Africa is the most vulnerable region of the world due to anthropogenic climate change challenges on account of dependence on nature for the sustenance of agriculture as her main source of income, high level of poverty, and low level of literacy. Climate change adaptation involves strategies of adjusting to the negative effects of climate change, while climate change mitigation involves techniques that help to reduce production of greenhouse gases through burning fossil fuels. The African worldview from the frontier of (...) Nigerian epistemological and ontological perspectives as it finds expression in climate change adaptation and mitigation is built on the foundations of its relationship with nature, traditional religion and belief systems, agricultural practices, and some other day-to-day practices. Worldview analysis of the contemporary Nigerian has been conducted and classified into Original African, Westernized African, and Little Here-and-There African, a paradigm existing in Nigerians irrespective of level of Western education. What will be the fate of the younger Nigerian climate scientist in a globalized and technologically competitive world? This question gives rise to further discussion on the principles and application of the theory of Culturo-Techno-Contextual Approach as postulated by Peter A. Okebukola and applied to creating an environment for meaningful learning on climate change adaptation and mitigation for the future generations of Nigerians. (shrink)

This paper asks whether workers’ experience of working with new technologies and workers’ perceived threats of new technologies are associated with expected well-being. Using survey data for 25 OECD countries we find that both experiences of new technologies and threats of new technologies are associated with more concern about expected well-being. Controlling for the negative experiences of COVID-19 on workers and their macroeconomic outlook both mitigate these findings, but workers with negative experiences of working alongside and with new (...) technologies still report lower expected well-being. (shrink)

Kristján Kristjánsson, On the Very Idea of Negative Emotions, pp. 351364 As attention has shifted towards the emotions in general, the notion of so-called negative emotions has come in for renewed interest. The author explores this notion and argues that its invocation cannot be done without cost to our understanding since it obscures all sorts of relevant complexities. There are thus no emotions around to which we can helpfully refer collectively as negative, although there are of course (...) painful emotions, emotions that negatively evaluate states of affairs, emotions that are negatively morally evaluated, and so forth. Furthermore, while attempts are under way to reappraise various (commonly) negatively evaluated emotions, those attempts involve different kinds of argument which cannot and should not be collected together as defenses of negative emotions. ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR. (shrink)

Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist methodology fail, the lesson of his proposal is that there is (...) good reason to pay close attention to several subtle aspects of the design of context shifting experiments. (shrink)

Rotating shifts are common among nurses to ensure continuity of care. This scheduling system encompasses several adverse health and performance consequences. One of the most injurious effects of night-time shift work is the deterioration of sleep patterns due to both circadian rhythm disruption and increased sleep homeostatic pressure. Sleep problems lead to secondary effects on other aspects of wellbeing and cognitive functioning, increasing the risk of errors and workplace accidents. A wide range of interventions has been proposed to improve (...) the sleep quality of nurses and promote an increase in attention levels. In recent years, particular attention has been paid to individual and environmental factors mediating the subjective ability to cope with sleep deprivation during the night shift. Given the predictive role of these factors on the negative impact of a night shift, an individualized intervention could represent an effective countermeasure by ensuring suitable management of shift schedules. Therefore, the aims of this mini-review are to: provide an updated overview of the literature on sleep problems in night shift nurses and their adverse consequences; and critically analyze the psychosocial factors that mediate the negative impact of shift work with the ultimate goal of defining an effective countermeasure based on an individualized approach. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive UtopianismAntonis Balasopoulos (bio)It is well known that the decline of programmatic or so-called blueprint utopias and utopianism came on the heels of a widespread and concerted attack against them during the first two decades of the Cold War. In the writings of thinkers like Hayek, Popper, Talmon, Kolakowski, and many others, program became synonymous with hubris.1 It was construed (...) as a dangerous effort to regulate the diversity of human subjectivity and the complexity of the social organism, a repressive will-to-order and predictability that tainted utopias by associating them with Totalitarianism. In Popper’s exemplary exposition:The Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint for society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship. [...] [Utopia] claims to plan rationally for the whole of society, although we do not possess anything like the factual knowledge which would be necessary to make good such an ambitious claim.2 [End Page 489]Yet, though this view of how Utopia, to recall Robert C. Elliott, became “a bad word,” is accurate in itself, it also reflects only the negative or destructive side of Cold War anti-utopianism, a trend whose logical inconsistencies and ideological biases have already been ably dissected in the work of Russell Jacoby, Marc Olssen, and Darren Webb, to name but a few.3What one could term the “positive” or “productive” side of anti-utopian denunciations of the dogmatically programmatic character allegedly inherent in utopias went well beyond the exigencies of generating a geopolitical and ideological enemy image. It involved an effort to reconcile western subjects to seismic and highly consequential shifts within postwar, late-capitalist societies themselves. If, as I have argued elsewhere, utopian fictions (and, indeed, nonfictions) before the Cold War period can be read as fictions of organization—of everything from architecture and urban planning, to production, sexuality and biological reproduction, clothing, or diet—it is also the case that in them, “organization” is a response, a reaction to traumatic historical experiences of disorganization, from the decline of the ancient city-state in the case of Platonic utopianism; to the impoverishment and dislocation of rural communities in the era of Thomas More; to the experience of the fracturing of religious community during the religious, civil, and international wars that marked the seventeenth century; to the dramatic impact of early nineteenth-century industrialization on artisanal and agrarian communities, on family cohesion and on the rhythms of the premodern working day.4My argument is, then, that the anti-utopian denunciation of blueprint and program was not simply motivated by the liberal capitalist attack against the planned and highly regulated character of economy and society in the countries of so-called actually existing socialism. It was also motivated by the ideological need to normalize and legitimize the transition, within western capitalist societies themselves, to what Scott Lash and John Urry called “disorganized capitalism.” Lash and Urry’s book, originally published during the decade of the triumphant rise of neoliberalism, in 1987, launches its investigation by tellingly quoting the passage of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto that focuses on the creatively destructive aspects of capitalist social transformation: the bourgeoisie, Lash and Urry observe, is a class “with vested interest in change, crisis and chaos”; the social world over which it presides is one “which swings wildly out of control, menacing and destructive.”5 In their introduction, the authors outline the basic features of the postwar shift from the organized capitalism of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its disarticulated successor formation during the rise of [End Page 490] neoliberal governance. Under the rubric of “disorganization” (which is to say, of a mutation within the western capitalist economic and social order), they include de-industrialization and the decline in the absolute and relative size of the working class in the core capitalist economies; the rise of flexible forms of labor organization in the place of defunct Taylorist principles; the weakening of trade unionist organization; the increasing decoupling of large monopolies from the control and regulation... (shrink)

All lives contain negative events, but how we think about these events differs across individuals; negative events often include positive details that can be remembered alongside the negative, and the ability to maintain both representations may be beneficial. In a survey examining emotional responses to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, the current study investigated how this ability shifts as a function of age and individual differences in initial experience of the event. Specifically, this study examined how emotional (...) importance, involvement, and self-reported surprise upon hearing about the event related to the tendency to report focusing on the negative and positive aspects of the bombings. Structural equation models revealed that while greater emotional importance and surprise were associated with a greater focus on negative elements, involvement and age were associated with increased consideration of positive aspects. Further, emotional importance was more strongly related to an increased focus on negative aspects for young adults and an increased focus on positive aspects for older adults, highlighting a tendency for older adults to enhance positive features of an otherwise highly negative event. (shrink)

Theories of affective influences on cognition posit that negative mood may increase cognitive load, causing a decrement in task performance (Seibert & Ellis, [1991]. Irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states, and cognitive task performance. Memory & Cognition, 19(5), 507–513), or cause a shift to more analytic thinking, which benefits tasks requiring attention to detail (Schwarz & Clore, [1983]. Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 513–523). We (...) previously reported that individuals who are higher in the trait of emotional reactivity performed better on an inhibitory task with increasing negative mood whereas low-reactive individuals showed the converse pattern (Gabel & McAuley, [2018]. Does mood help or hinder executive functions? Reactivity may be the key. Personality and Individual Differences, 128, 94–99; [2020]. React to act: Negative mood, response inhibition, and the moderating role of emotional reactivity. Motivation and Emotion, 44(6), 862–869). Because high-reactive individuals are more accustomed to negative affect (Nock et al., [2008]. The emotion reactivity scale: Development, evaluation, and relation to self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Behavior Therapy, 39(2), 107–116), we speculated that negative mood engendered analytic thinking but without a task-incongruent increase in cognitive load – thereby facilitating performance. Here, we induced a heuristic or analytic approach to information processing prior to performance of an inhibitory task and expected different results pending the thinking style induced. In the heuristic condition, increasing negative mood was associated with better performance for high-reactive participants but not their low-reactive counterparts. In the analytic condition, increasing negative mood was associated with better performance irrespective of emotional reactivity. Our results are consistent with the notion that negative mood engenders analytic thinking which may benefit response inhibition provided it does not increase task-incongruent cognitive load. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge has argued that typical citizens of affluent nations participate in an unjust global order that harms the global poor. This supports his conclusion that there are widespread negative institutional duties to reform the global order. I defend Pogge’s negative duty approach, but argue that his formulation of these duties is ambiguous between two possible readings, only one of which is properly confined to genuinely negative duties. I argue that this ambiguity leads him to shift (...) illicitly between negative and positive duties, and ultimately to overstate the extent of the negative ones. I also argue that recognition of this ambiguity makes it possible to draw a meaningful distinction between the relevant positive and negative duties, and that Pogge’s analysis can therefore be revised in a way that reveals substantial negative institutional duties to the global poor, albeit less extensive ones than Pogge asserts. In order to demonstrate this, I discuss two aspects of the global order that Pogge has criticized: the system of intellectual property rights in pharmaceuticals and the rights of de facto rulers to dispose of a nation’s natural resources. In each case, although I do not specify the relevant negative institutional duties precisely, I try to identify intelligible questions whose answers would reveal genuinely negative duties and show that their likely answers are distinct from the conclusions asserted by Pogge and suggested by his analysis. (shrink)

This paper reports on the findings of a study that considered how anxiety might function to organise nurses’ practice. With reference to psychoanalytic theory this paper analyses field notes taken during a series of nursing change‐of‐shift handovers. The handover practices analysed met all the criteria for a ritual, as understood in psychoanalytic theory, and functioned to alleviate anxiety in the short term while symbolically expressing a forbidden and unknown knowledge. We argue that the handover ritual contained certain prohibitions, yet (...) allowed some expression of the prohibited knowledge in a disguised way. The prohibition concerned how the patient affected the nurse, that is, moved the nurse to love and hate the patient. We argue that this prohibition is expressed, in disguise, via the displacement of affection for the patient onto other nurses and through negative stereotyping of some patients. We also argue that these prohibitions of the handover mirror broader prohibitions within nursing, and thus the rituals of the handover become an expression of how professional prohibitions are enacted in practice. We conclude that the important implicit function of the handover ritual is to keep anxiety at bay, thereby enabling the nurse to commence practice rather than being immobilised by the effect of potentially overwhelming anxiety. (shrink)

The paper investigates the first occurrences of the term «phenomenology» in the United States, underlying as well the history of its progressive resemantization. The temporal frame 1939-1962 refers to the foundation of the two major American phenomenological societies: the International Phenomenological Society (IPS) and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). Accordingly, it will be described the shift of meanings of the word «phenomenology»: originally the term simply meant «Husserlian philosophy», but in the turn of a few decades (...) it ended up to de- note a plurality of different meanings, not always mutually compatible. The paper presents elements of historical reconstruction (the early institutional phases, the relationship between American and European phenomenologists, the «existential» turning-point of the Sixties, etc.) as well as elements of theoretical analysis. The main thesis is that the early-history of phenomenology in the US helps us to better understand the reasons that support the analytic-continental distinction and, at the same time, the unbearable tension of this distinction. (shrink)

In this essay I engage the perspective of film phenomenology to analyze the black screen as a frame-breaking negative experience, based on an understanding of cinema as event. Relying on Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological approach and taking inspiration from Cecil M. Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over, a case in point for a method predicated on the question of “how,” I place emphasis on the “film’s body” and consciousness which, through its own paralysis and impairment, affects the spectator’s (...) lived-body. Following the terminology of sociologist Erving Goffman, I approach both a car accident at the turn of the twentieth century and 9/11 on the cusp of the new millennium as frame-breaking events that generate a profound negative experience. I then describe the black screen in 9/11 films as a frame-breaking occurrence that creates a negative event in its own right. The encounter with the breakage of the conventional mechanisms and modes of the “film’s body” as well as the forced sensory shift lead the spectator to a heightened awareness of his/her own body as a receiving medium that empathetically partakes in the experience of a negative event at the scene of cinema, both perceptually and reflexively. (shrink)

Any study of the philosophical literature dealing with the cluster of topics generally identified as ‘functional description’, ‘functional analysis’, and ‘teleological explanation’ naturally raises the problem of confirming, disconfirming, or at least relating the alternative logical models proposed by philosophers to the actual usage of biologists. A close examination of current biological literature reveals that acceptance or rejection of what philosophers or sociologists might call a ‘functionalist’ perspective or approach is not significant for the division of biologists into schools or (...) factions. It is certainly not the case that a functionalist perspective distinguishes the wholistic or organismic faction from the molecular biologists. In fact, molecular biologists shift back and forth from ‘functional’ to simple causal perspectives with considerable indifference. This is particularly true of the literature based upon the so-called operon hypothesis developed by the Nobel laureates Jacob and Monod. (shrink)

Abstract Kung?sun Lung's thesis on ?White Horse [is] not Horse? has been solved by A. C. Graham on the basis of a part/whole logic and by Chad Hansen on that and a ?mass?noun? hypothesis. We present it as a case of reducing White Horse to its two most telling marks and then, on the basis of the good Sense (instead of Reference) in a Negative Logic?the pragmatics of locating X as the remainder left over when all non?X's have been (...) removed?show how a stable hand, receiving an order for White Horse would scan first for Horse by removing all non?horse shapes and then for White by removing all colours except White. This way we can prove how indeed ?A request for White Horse cannot be satisfied by Black and Brown that fills an order for Horse... (because) to exclude some colour [in the second scan] is not the same as to exclude yet no colour [in the first scan].? No part/whole or mass?sum is presumed. The whole discussion is set in the context of shifting criteria for judging name from Confucius to Hsun?tzu. (shrink)

This investigation addresses the hypothesis that negative affect is associated with decreased ability to shift attention to a new focus. Thirty-nine participants completed a covert attentional orienting task and then viewed a distressing film clip. Mood was measured by self-report at the beginning and end of the session. Correlations between attentional orienting performance and self-reported mood indicated that participants with greater response time costs on invalidly cued trials reported more negative affect in response to the film. These (...) results support the hypothesis that negative affect is associated with a slowness to disengage attention. (shrink)

Neuroscientists have formulated the model of emotional intelligence based on brain imaging findings of individual differences in EI. The main objective of our study was to operationalize the advantage of high EI individuals in emotional information processing and regulation both at behavioral and neural levels of investigation. We used a self-report measure and a cognitive reappraisal task to demonstrate the role of EI in emotional perception and regulation. Participants saw pictures with negative or neutral captions and shifted from (...) class='Hi'>negative context to neutral while we registered brain activation. Behavioral results showed that higher EI participants reported more unpleasant emotions. The Utilization of emotions scores negatively correlated with the valence ratings and the subjective difficulty of reappraisal. In the negative condition, we found activation in hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, cingulate cortex, insula and superior temporal lobe. In the neutral context, we found elevated activation in vision-related areas and HC. During reappraisal condition, we found activation in the medial frontal gyrus, temporal areas, vision-related regions and in cingulate gyrus. We conclude that higher EI is associated with intensive affective experiences even if emotions are unpleasant. Strong skills in utilizing emotions enable one not to repress negative feelings but to use them as source of information. High EI individuals use effective cognitive processes such as directing attention to relevant details; have advantages in allocation of cognitive resources, in conceptualization of emotional scenes and in building emotional memories; they use visual cues, imagination and executive functions to regulate negative emotions effectively. (shrink)

The increased governmental focus on happiness since the late 1990s, and particularly since the economic crash of 2008, has been informed predominantly by a conceptualisation of happiness promoted by the field of positive psychology, and adopted and developed in fields such as behavioural economics and more recently in fields such as neuroeducation. Concepts, or traits, associated with feeling happy or satisfied with our lives, such as resilience, are now promoted across both public and private domains as a means to improve (...) our quality of life, our productivity and our attainment. The promotion of this positive psychological notion of happiness in the context of education not only presents these traits as virtues of the productive learning citizen but also effects a delegitimisation of the negative. Analysis of curricula programmes, seen alongside the shift taken towards a focus on the individual as brain, highlights the pedagogical and political implications of this. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to inquire into today's social pathologies, i.e. the negative consequences of the developmental processes of society. In a dialogue with Axel Honneth, the article asserts that a shift has occurred in individualization, a shift that implies a fundamental change in social pathologies: Social pathologies no longer derive from social barriers inhibiting self‐realization but from self‐realization itself. As a consequence, philosophy of education, rather than sociology, appears to be the relevant field of (...) study. The article develops a social‐analytical perspective on ‘sickness in self‐Bildung’, which is conceived as a ‘refusal to transcend oneself into sociality’, and offers interpretations of present pathologies such as depression, anorexia, populist freedom of speech, and demonic rage. (shrink)

Educational literature has tended to focus, explicitly and implicitly, on two kinds of task orientation: the ability either to focus on a single task, or to multi-task. A third form of orientation characterises many highly successful people. This is the ability to combine several tasks into one: to ‘kill two birds with one stone’. This skill characterises people with initiative, who exercise judgment, deliberation and creative imagination in their personal organisation. The motivation to work in this way indicates personal commitment (...) rather than mere compliance. Focusing on its development educationally implies a shift from either/or, linear, methodical, mechanical and technicist thinking to encouraging individual and collective responsibility, initiative and risk-taking, resulting in unpredictable outcomes. The emphasis on judgment renders the issues as ethical rather than narrowly instrumental. Dominant ethical approaches are, therefore, considered in relation to this in terms of its application for teaching. (shrink)

Rambo (2008) marked the return of Sylvester Stallone's iconic action hero. What is most striking about the fourth film (as the response from reviewers testifies), is its graphic violence. My intention here is to critically engage with Rambo (2008) as rewriting the series' established aesthetic of violence. My overarching aim is to highlight how the popular press has sought to read the 2008 version of Rambo according to the discursive narratives surrounding Stallone's 1980s action films. The negative response to (...) Rambo, I argue, stems from relying on critical patterns that do not fit the film itself. (shrink)

The persistence of doping in professional sports—either by individuals on an isolated basis and by whole teams as part of a systematic doping programme—means that professional sport today is rarely if ever untainted. There are financial incentives in place that incentivise doping and there are data that show that doping is often a systematic, organised enterprise. The main question to be answered today in professional sports is whether doping’s repressive anti-doping policies do not have greater negative consequences for society. (...) Whilst some have suggested legitimising safe doping under medical control, in this paper, I argue that doing so will do little to prevent clandestine use of dangerous performance-enhancing substances, and suggest an alternative solution to lifting the ban on doping, i.e. starting from extending liability for doping in sport beyond athletes to those holding power and authority over athletes, to changing winning incentives for doping, to making sport sustainable in the longer time by devising ways of providing athletes with a steady income which is not linked to record breaking or sponsorships. (shrink)

Emotional fluctuations are ubiquitous in everyday life, but precisely how they sculpt the temporal organisation of memories remains unclear. Here, we designed a novel task – the Emotion Boundary Task – wherein participants viewed sequences of negative and neutral images surrounded by a colour border. We manipulated perceptual context (border colour), emotional-picture valence, as well as the direction of emotional-valence shifts (i.e., shifts from neutral-to-negative and negative-to-neutral events) to create events with a shared perceptual and/or emotional context. (...) We measured memory for temporal order and temporal distances for images processed within and across events. Negative images processed within events were remembered as closer in time compared to neutral ones. In contrast, temporal distances were remembered as longer for images spanning neutral-to-negative shifts – suggesting temporal dilation in memory with the onset of a negative event following a previously-neutral state. The extent of negative-picture induced temporal dilation in memory correlated with dispositional negativity across individuals. Lastly, temporal order memory was enhanced for recently-presented negative (versus neutral) images. These findings suggest that emotional-state dynamics matters when considering emotion-temporal memory interactions: While persistent negative events may compress subjectively remembered time, dynamic shifts from neutral-to-negative events produce temporal dilation in memory, with implications for adaptive emotional functioning. (shrink)

The negative consequences of physicians' failure to establish and maintain personal relationships with patients are at the heart of the humanistic crisis in medicine. To resolve this crisis, a new model of doctor-patient interaction is proposed, based on the ideas of Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue. This model shows how the physican may successfully combine the personal (I-Thou) and impersonal (I-It) aspects of medicine in three stages. These Three Stages of Medical Dialogue include:1. An Initial Personal Meeting stage, which (...) initiates the doctor-patient relationship and involves mutual confirmation; 2. An Examination stage, which requires a shift from a personal to an impersonal style of interaction; 3. An Integration Through Dialogue or Healing Through Meeting Stage, which involves the integration of the impersonal medical data into the ongoing dialogue between doctor and patient, as a basis for shared decision-making. The use of the model, as well as common failures of doctor-patient dialogue are discussed. (shrink)

The shift from electromechanical computing to fully electronic, digital, Turing-complete computing was one of the most in?uential technological developments of the twentieth century. The social, economic, political, interdisciplinary, and cultural aspects behind that shift were signi?cant, but are often ignored. When the contingencies and controversies behind the birth of modern computing are forgotten, the history of computing is often misrepresented as one of uncomplicated linear progress. In this article some of the sociocultural aspects of the birth of modern (...) computing are reviewed. The signi?cance of interdisciplinary work is discussed. The concept of the stored-program paradigm is introduced, and some sociocultural factors behind its birth are discussed. Finally, it is argued that some traits of research that are often considered to be negative, such as opportunism, eclecticism, and stubbornness, have played a positive role in the birth of modern computing technology. (shrink)

The shift from coal to natural gas to fuel electricity generation has positive and negative consequences for people in the affected areas of the US. Representations of the situation in the media shape how citizens understand and respond to it. We explore the role of proximity in media discourse about the closing of a coal-fired power plant near Waynesburg, a small city in a Pennsylvania coal-mining region. Comparing reporting in smaller-circulation newspapers closer to the site with reporting in (...) larger-circulation regional newspapers, we find that Waynesburg-area papers simply describe the events leading to the closure while regional papers analyze the events in larger contexts, and that politicians, not the plant owners, are represented as blaming environmentalists for job loss. Our findings point to the importance of proximity in environmental discourse and to the need to examine not only what kinds of discourse circulate, but also how and to whom. (shrink)