This paper investigates the effects of Buddhist ethics on consumers’ materialism, that is, the propensity to attach a fundamental role to possessions. The literature shows that religion and religiosity influence various attitudes and behaviors of consumers, including their ethical beliefs and ethical decisions. However, most studies focus on general religiosity rather than on the specific doctrinal ethical tenets of religions. The current research focuses on Buddhism and argues that it can tame materialism directly, similar to other religions, and through the (...) specific Buddhist ethical doctrines of the Four Immeasurables: compassion, loving kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The empirical results show the following: (1) Buddhism reduces materialism directly and through some of the Four Immeasurables, and (2) despite the doctrine of non-existence of the self, positive emotions toward the self are still present, and the self absorbs the effects of Buddhist ethics on materialism. The latter finding suggests a “resistance of the self” that is coherent with the idea of a consumer who leverages the self to go beyond it. (shrink)

Activity in the prefrontal cortex may distinguish the meta-awareness experienced during lucid dreams from its absence in normal dreams. To examine a possible relationship between dream lucidity and prefrontal task performance, we carried out a prospective study in 28 high school students. Participants performed the Wisconsin Card Sort and Iowa Gambling tasks, then for 1 week kept dream journals and reported sleep quality and lucidity-related dream characteristics. Participants who exhibited a greater degree of lucidity performed significantly better on the task (...) that engages the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, but degree of lucidity achieved did not distinguish performance on the task that engages the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, nor did it distinguish self-reported sleep quality or baseline characteristics. The association between performance on the Iowa Gambling Task and lucidity suggests a connection between lucid dreaming and ventromedial prefrontal function. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare the debate on phenomenal intentionality in the philosophy of mind with Husserl's phenomenology. I make a survey of various theoretical options within the " phenomenal intentionality research program ", in order to show how these issues are present also in phenomenology. I focus my analysis on the distinction between static and genetic phenomenology, in relation to the issue of the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and intentionality and I argue that, in order to address this issue, (...) we must turn to the analysis of the temporal self-manifestation of subjectivity. (shrink)

Until the discovery of catalytic RNA, the notion that all enzymes are proteins had seemed incontrovertible. Now the existence of RNA enzymes has been confirmed in a variety of contexts. What is known about the chemistry of RNA‐catalyzed reactions is reviewed below, with particular attention to the self‐splicing rRNA intron of Tetrahymena thermophila and the processing of pre‐tRNA molecules by RNase P.

The medical ethicist is a fairly recent addition to the clinical setting. The following four potential roles of the clinical ethicist are identified and discussed: consultant in difficult cases, educator of health care providers, counselor for health care providers and finally patient advocate to protect the interests of patients. While the various roles may sometimes overlap, the roles of educator and counselor are viewed as being more congruent with the education and training of medical ethicists than are the roles (...) of consultant and patient advocate. (shrink)

In the wake of a pilot study that indicated that the experience of medical education appears to Inhibit moral development In medical students, increased attention needs to be given to the structure of medical education and the Influence it has on medical students. Interest in ethics and moral reasoning has become widespread in many aspects of professional and public life. Society has exhibited great interest in the ethical issues confronting physicians today. Considerable effort has been undertaken to train medical students, (...) interns, and residents In how to reason through medical-ethical dilemmas. Media attention has focused on Issues such as abortion, euthanasia, care of severely handicapped infants, organ transplantation, and so forth, producing heated debates in both the professional and lay literature over the morality of the various positions. The curriculum of medical education has paralleled and reflected this general Interest in medical ethics. Most medical schools now offer, and frequently require, course work in ethics. However, further research Is needed to better characterize and understand the relationship of medical education to moral development. (shrink)

In recent years, self-paced learning has attracted much attention due to its improvement to nonconvex optimization based machine learning algorithms. As a methodology introduced from human learning, SPL dynamically evaluates the learning difficulty of each sample and provides the weighted learning model against the negative effects from hard-learning samples. In this study, we proposed a cognitive driven SPL method, i.e., retrospective robust self-paced learning, which is inspired by the following two issues in human learning process: the (...) misclassified samples are more impressive in upcoming learning, and the model of the follow-up learning process based on large number of samples can be used to reduce the risk of poor generalization in initial learning phase. We simultaneously estimated the degrees of learning-difficulty and misclassified in each step of SPL and proposed a framework to construct multilevel SPL for improving the robustness of the initial learning phase of SPL. The proposed method can be viewed as a multilayer model and the output of the previous layer can guide constructing robust initialization model of the next layer. The experimental results show that the R2SPL outperforms the conventional self-paced learning models in classification task. (shrink)

It is suggested that the anatomical structures whichmediate consciousness evolved as decisiveembellishments to a (non-conscious) design strategypresent even in the simplest monocellular organisms.Consciousness is thus not the pinnacle of ahierarchy whose base is the primitive reflex, becausereflexes require a nervous system, which the monocelldoes not possess. By postulating that consciousness isintimately connected to self-paced probing of theenvironment, also prominent in prokaryotic behavior,one can make mammalian neuroanatomy amenable todramatically simple rationalization.

An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas (...) both German and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect. (shrink)

Self-compassion, sharing some commonalities with positive psychology 2.0 approaches, is associated with better mental health outcomes in diverse populations, including workers. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is heightened awareness of the importance of self-care for fostering mental health at work. However, evidence regarding the applications of self-compassion interventions in work-related contexts has not been systematically reviewed to date. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to synthesize and evaluate the utility of self-compassion interventions targeting work-related well-being, as (...) well as assess the methodological quality of relevant studies. Eligible articles were identified from research databases including ProQuest, PsycINFO, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The quality of non-randomized trials and randomized controlled trials was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and the Quality Assessment Table, respectively. The literature search yielded 3,387 titles from which ten studies met the inclusion criteria. All ten studies reported promising effects of self-compassion training for work-related well-being. The methodological quality of these studies was medium. All ten studies recruited workers in a caring field and were mostly conducted in Western countries. The Self-Compassion Scale or its short-form was used in almost all instances. Findings indicate that self-compassion training can improve self-compassion and other work-related well-being outcomes in working populations. However, in general, there is need for greater methodological quality in work-related self-compassion intervention studies to advance understanding regarding the applications and limitations of this technique in work contexts. Furthermore, future studies should focus on a broader range of employee groups, including non-caring professions as well as individuals working in non-Western countries. (shrink)

The relationship between metacognition and mindreading was investigated by comparing the monitoring of one’s own learning and another person’s learning . Previous studies indicated that in self-paced study judgments of learning for oneself are inversely related to the amount of study time invested in each item. This suggested reliance on the memorizing-effort heuristic that shorter ST is diagnostic of better recall. In this study although an inverse ST–JOL relationship was observed for Self, it was found for Other (...) only when the Other condition followed the Self condition. The results were interpreted in terms of the proposal that the processes underlying experience-based metacognitive judgments are largely unconscious. However, participants can derive insight from observing themselves as they monitor their own learning, and transfer that insight to Other, thus exhibiting a shift from experience-based to theory-based judgments. Although different processes mediate metacognition and mindreading, metacognition can inform mindreading. (shrink)

BackgroundAt present, adherence to antipsychotic treatment is often poor, leading to the recurrence of symptoms. This increases the likelihood of the patient experiencing disability and thus increases the disease burden for the patient, their family, and society as a whole. However, to date, there is no clear evidence regarding the effect of medication adherence interventions on outcomes for patients with schizophrenia. Moreover, the traditional intervention methods are limited by manpower and resources in low- and middle-income countries. Recent studies have demonstrated (...) that increasing a patient’s level of self-compassion may improve their treatment adherence. Online mental health care interventions have advantages in terms of feasibility and acceptability for patients with schizophrenia. In this regard, a WeChat-based self-compassion training protocol to improve patient treatment adherence was designed in this study and will be evaluated in the future to determine its impact on patients with schizophrenia.MethodsThe protocol for the randomized controlled trial is based on the SPIRIT 2013 statement. This parallel RCT will aim to recruit 392 patients with schizophrenia who will be randomized at a 1:1 ratio into a 3-week intervention or control group. Both groups will receive routine care. The intervention group will also receive WeChat-based self-compassion training, which requires participants to complete three tasks every day, including a reading task, a meditation task, and a self-compassion journal task. The control group will receive WeChat-based psychological health education, which will only require participants to read positive articles about psychological health every day. Medication adherence, self-compassion, stigma, and social support will be measured at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and 3 weeks after the intervention. Program feasibility will be evaluated throughout the course of the study, and acceptability will be measured immediately after the intervention.Expected results:The intervention described here will address the barriers to accessing mental health care for people with schizophrenia, including patients’ desire for independent management, difficulty accessing providers, and concerns about privacy and stigma. The current study provides guidance for clinical nurses to carry out psychological intervention, with the ultimate aim of addressing the problems associated with a shortage of psychological professionals in low- and middle-income countries. (shrink)

This study examines whether Chinese complement coercion sentences with aspectual verbs will elicit processing difficulty during real-time comprehension. Complement coercion is a linguistic phenomenon in which certain verbs, requiring an event-denoting complement, are combined with an entity-denoting complement, as in The author started a book. Previous studies have reported that the entity-denoting complement elicited processing difficulty following verbs that require event argument compared with verbs that do not. While the processing of complement coercion has been extensively studied in Indo-European languages (...) such as English and German, it is relatively under-researched in Sino-Tibetan languages such as Mandarin Chinese. Given the fact that there are many linguistic elements behaving distinctly in the different language families, for instance, verbs with respect to their semantic properties and syntactic representations of the complement, it is meaningful to investigate whether or not the existing linguistic differences have any effect on the processing of complement coercion in Mandarin. With this research goal, we recorded self-paced reading time of 61 native Mandarin speakers to investigate the processing of the entity-denoting complement in sentences with three different verb types, as exemplified in 顾客开始/填写/查看这份问卷 gù-kè kāi-shǐ/tián-xiě/chá-kàn zhè-fèn wèn-juàn “The customer started/filled in/checked the questionnaire.” It was found that the entity noun complement elicited significantly longer reading times in coercion sentences than non-coercion counterparts. The results are compatible with the previous findings in English that complement coercion sentences impose processing cost during real-time comprehension. The study contributes empirical evidence to coercion studies cross-linguistically. (shrink)

Previous work on the comprehension of agreement has shown that incorrectly inflected verbs do not trigger responses typically seen with fully ungrammatical verbs when the preceding sentential context furnishes a possibly matching distractor noun (i.e., agreement attraction). We report eight studies, three being direct replications, designed to assess the degree of similarity of these errors in the comprehension of subject-verb agreement along the dimensions of grammatical gender and number in Modern Standard Arabic. A meta-analysis of the results demonstrate the presence (...) of agreement attraction effects in reading comprehension for gender and number on verbs. Moreover, the meta-analysis demonstrates that these two features do not behave identically: gender effects are larger and occur later relative to number attraction effects. These results challenge models of agreement that predict agreement features to be equipotent and show that real-time models of agreement require modifications in the form of cue-weighting in order to account for these differential results. (shrink)

Logical metonymy resolution (begin a book begin reading a book or begin writing a book) has traditionally been explained either through complex lexical entries (qualia structures) or through the integration of the implicit event via post-lexical access to world knowledge. We propose that recent work within the words-as-cues paradigm can provide a more dynamic model of logical metonymy, accounting for early and dynamic integration of complex event information depending on previous contextual cues (agent and patient). We first present a (...) class='Hi'>self-paced reading experiment on German subordinate sentences, where metonymic sentences and their paraphrased version differ only in the presence or absence of the clause-final target verb (Der Konditor begann die Glasur Der Konditor begann, die Glasur aufzutragen/The baker began the icing The baker began spreading the icing). Longer reading times at the target verb position in a high-typicality condition (baker + icing spread ) compared to a low-typicality (but still plausible) condition (child + icing spread) suggest that we make use of knowledge activated by lexical cues to build expectations about events. The early and dynamic integration of event knowledge in metonymy interpretation is bolstered by further evidence from a second experiment using the probe recognition paradigm. Presenting covert events as probes following a high-typicality or a low-typicality metonymic sentence (Der Konditor begann die Glasur AUFTRAGEN/The baker began the icing SPREAD), we obtain an analogous effect of typicality at 100 ms interstimulus interval. (shrink)

This article presents ethnographic research on women's self-defense training and suggests that women's self-defense culture prompts feminists to refigure our understanding of the body and violence. The body in feminist discourse is often construed as the object of patriarchal violence, and violence has been construed as something that is variously oppressive, diminishing, inappropriate, and masculinist. Hence, many feminists have been apathetic to women's self-defense. As a practice that rehearses, and even celebrates women's potential for violence, women's (...) self-defense illustrates how and why feminism can frame the body as both a social construction and as politically significant for theory and activism. (shrink)

BackgroundResistance training can offer beneficial physiological and psychological effects. The regular continuation of this exercise can be accomplished by improving the recovery and mood after a workout. Frequency-specific microcurrent might offer a solution here as it has been shown to improve physical injuries, mood state, and sleep. However, knowledge is lacking about the impact of microstimulation after RT on said parameters. The present study aimed to test the effects of RT and muscle-microstimulation on mood and physical recovery in healthy (...) men after performing conventional deadlifts, which is a type of RT.MethodsThe study was conducted according to a single-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, and two-way crossover study. Twenty participants naïve to microstimulation engaged in RT twice on separate days. They were randomized to receive MS on 1 day and no microstimulation on another day. Before and after the workout and after their treatment, participants self-rated their mood state and mental and physical exhaustion levels.ResultsFindings showed that MS increased the self-ratings of well-rested and sociable and, most importantly, reduced the feeling of exercise-induced exhaustion. There were no MS effects on ratings of feeling sad, happy, or exhausted, although the workout, independent of MS, negatively influenced the level of exhaustion.ConclusionThe combination of enhanced sociableness, reduced fatigue, and exercise-induced exhaustion after a workout, followed by microstimulation, has important implications for professional sporters and nonprofessionals who try to get the best result after a workout. Future studies using a double-blind approach including different types of exercises, different durations of programs, and both sexes can shed more light on the full potential of microstimulation after a workout on mood state and exercise-induced exhaustion. (shrink)

Higher education in the 21st century faces the challenge of changing the way in which knowledge is conveyed and how teachers and students interact in the teaching-learning process. The current pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has hastened the need to face up to this challenge and has furthered the need to approach the issue from the perspective of digitalisation. To achieve this, it is necessary to design training programmes geared towards teaching staff and which address both the use of technology (...) and instructional design aimed at promoting the development of self-regulated learning and automatic feedback systems. In this study, work was carried out with 23 teachers in a training programme conducted through Moodle. The aims were: to test whether there were any significant differences between the behaviour patterns of new teachers compared to experienced teachers, to determine whether clusters of behaviour patterns corresponded to the type of teacher and to ascertain whether the level of teacher satisfaction with the training activity in digital teaching will depend on the type of teacher. A quantitative as well as a qualitative design was applied. Differences were found in the behaviour patterns in the training activities for the development of rubrics and use of learning analytics systems in virtual learning environments. It was also found that the type of teacher did not correspond exactly to the behaviour cluster in the learning platform. In addition, no significant differences were found in the level of satisfaction between the two kinds of teacher. The main contribution this study makes is to provide a detailed description of the training stage as well as the materials required for its repetition. Further analytical studies are required on teacher perception of training programmes in digital teaching in order to provide personalised training proposals that lead to an effective use of teaching in digital environments. (shrink)

When efficiently used for action, tool becomes part of body, with effect on the spatial temporal movement parameters and body size perception. Until now, no previous investigation was reported about tool embodiment in Parkinson’s disease (PD), that is a neurological disease characterized by several sensory and motor symptoms affecting body and action. We enrolled fourteen individuals affected by PD and eighteen healthy individuals as controls. We studied the spatial-temporal parameters on self-paced free pointing movements task, via an optoelectronic (...) system, before and after a short training in which a 27 cm long rod was used to point toward a far target. Moreover, we investigated changes in estimation of arm length through the Tactile Estimation Task. After the tool use training, controls showed changes in spatial-temporal parameters: they were slower to perform movements and reported higher value of deceleration, respect to the baseline. However, such a difference did not emerged in the PD individuals. In the Tactile Discrimination Task, no difference emerged before and after the tool use training in both groups. Our results were suggestive of possible difficulties of tool embodiment process in PD. We discussed our results in relation to aberrant multisensory integration as well as in terms of the effect of PD sensory and motor symptoms on body schema plasticity. The present study points at a novel way to conceive PD sensory motor signs and symptoms, in terms of their effect on individuals’ body representation. (shrink)

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to compare different modes of feedback on 30 min cycling time-trial performance in non-cyclist’s and cyclists-triathletes, and investigate cyclists-triathlete’s information acquisition.Methods: 20 participants performed two 30 min self-paced cycling time-trials with either a single feedback or multiple feedback. Cyclists-triathlete’s information acquisition was also monitored during the multiple feedback trial via an eye tracker. Perceptual measurements of task motivation, ratings of perceived exertion and affect were collected every 5 min. Performance variables and (...) heart rate were recorded continuously.Results: Cyclists-triathletes average power output was greater compared to non-cyclists with both multiple feedback. Whereas, cyclists-triathletes 30 min cycling time-trial performance was impaired with multiple feedback compared to single feedback. Cyclists-triathlete’s primary and secondary objects of regard were power and elapsed time. However, total glance time during multiple feedback decreased from the first 5 min to the last 5 min.Conclusion: Cyclists-triathletes indoor 30 min cycling TT performance was impaired with multiple feedback compared to single feedback. Whereas non-cyclist’s performance did not differ between multiple and single feedback. Cyclists-triathletes glanced at power and time which corresponds with the wireless sensor networks they use during training. However, total glance time during multiple feedback decreased over time, and therefore, overloading athletes with feedback may decrease performance in cyclists-triathletes. (shrink)