Low mean fundamental frequency (F 0) in men’s voices has been found to positively influence perceptions of dominance by men and attractiveness by women using standardized speech. Using natural speech obtained during an ecologically valid social interaction, we examined relationships between multiple vocal parameters and dominance and attractiveness judgments. Male voices from an unscripted dating game were judged by men for physical and social dominance and by women in fertile and non-fertile menstrual cycle phases for desirability in short-term and long-term (...) relationships. Five vocal parameters were analyzed: mean F 0 (an acoustic correlate of vocal fold size), F 0 variation, intensity (loudness), utterance duration, and formant dispersion (D f , an acoustic correlate of vocal tract length). Parallel but separate ratings of speech transcripts served as controls for content. Multiple regression analyses were used to examine the independent contributions of each of the predictors. Physical dominance was predicted by low F 0 variation and physically dominant word content. Social dominance was predicted only by socially dominant word content. Ratings of attractiveness by women were predicted by low mean F 0, low D f , high intensity, and attractive word content across cycle phase and mating context. Low D f was perceived as attractive by fertile-phase women only. We hypothesize that competitors and potential mates may attend more strongly to different components of men’s voices because of the different types of information these vocal parameters provide. (shrink)

In philosophy, the textbook case for the discussion of human motivation is the examination (and almost always, the refutation) of psychological egoism. The arguments have become part of the folklore of our tribe, from their inclusion in countless introductory texts. [...] One of my central aims has been to define the issues empirically, so we do not just settle them by definition. Although I am inclined at present to put my bets on the reward-event theory, with its internalism, monism, and (...) causal primacy of satisfaction, I think we are very far from knowing enough to settle these questions concerning motivation, human or otherwise. The winds of science will blow where they may. In the meantime, we can be a bit more circumspect about what we put in our tribal folklore. (shrink)

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the 19th-century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early 19th-century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from being objective scientific concepts. He (...) demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought. (shrink)

A developing neurobiological/psychological theory of positive motivation gives a key causal role to reward events in the brain which can be directly activated by electrical stimulation (ESB). In its strongest form, this Reward Event Theory (RET) claims that all positive motivation, primary and learned, is functionally dependent on these reward events. Some of the empirical evidence is reviewed which either supports or challenges RET. The paper examines the implications of RET for the concepts of 'motivation', 'desire' and 'reward' or 'pleasure'. (...) It is argued (1) that a 'causal base' as opposed to a functional' concept of motivation has theoretical advantages; (2) that a causal distinction between the focus' and the 'anchor' of desire suggests an ineliminable 'opacity' of desire; and (3) that some affective concept, such as 'pleasure', should play a key role in psychological explanation, distinct from that of motivational (or cognitive) concepts. A concept of 'reward' or 'pleasure' as intrinsically positive affect is defended, and contrasted with the more 'operational' definitions of 'reward' in some of the hypotheses of Roy Wise. (shrink)

What motivates behavior? What are the qualities of experience which make life worth living? Taking a new interdisciplinary approach, Morillo advances the theory that pleasure—interpreted as a distinct, separable, noncognitive quality of experience—is essential for all positive motivation and is the only intrinsic, nonmoral good in the lives of human beings and many other sentient creatures. Morillo supports her arguments with recent neuropsychological evidence concerning the role of reward centers in the brain and philosophical arguments for a naturalistic theory of (...) value and the good life. "Contingent Creatures" will interest philosophers, psychologists, and neurobiologists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective CommunicationCarolyn R. MillerThe Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective Communication. Wayne C. BoothMalden, Mass: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. xvi + 206. $20.95, paperback.By using the traditional word rhetoric I want to suggest a whole philosophy of how men succeed or fail in discovering together, in discourse, new levels of truth (or at least agreement) that neither side suspected before.—Wayne C. (...) Booth, 1974Listening-Rhetoric is what I most long to celebrate and practice—the kind that is sadly rare.... Here both sides join in a trusting dispute, determined to listen to the opponent's arguments, while persuading the opponent to listen in exchange.... Both sides are pursuing not just victory but a new reality, a new agreement about what is real.—Wayne C. Booth, 2004By the evidence of these two quotations, the late Wayne Booth sustained a passionate interest in a constructivist, cooperative rhetoric for at least thirty years. His 1974 Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent first sounds many of the themes that are rearticulated in his 2004 The Rhetoric of RHETORIC, a volume in the Blackwell Manifestos series. Both books were motivated by evident failures of public discourse, the earlier one by those emanating from the Vietnam War, including student protests at the University of Chicago, and the recent one by multiple rhetorical sins of the Bush administration and the national media, especially those concerning the war in Iraq. Indeed, Booth confesses here that his distress dates at least to 1963, when he lamented that "the debate about the [Kennedy] assassination [may be] a greater national disgrace than the assassination itself" (109).What animates Booth in both books is the conviction not that only we can do better in conducting our discursive relationships as a nation, as institutions, as families, but that we must do so. We must do so because our ability to live and progress together depends on our talking rather than resorting to force and on our talking in a way that engenders trust and enables continued debate, rather than provoking mistrust and disrespect. The two enemies he has always in sight are violence and deception. These are two forms of rhetorical failure, but the two become entangled when "violence and the threat of violence corrupt rhetoric," particularly during times of war (118), and when corrupt rhetoric itself becomes a kind of violence (48). [End Page 261]As a "manifesto" addressed to a non-specialist audience, The Rhetoric of RHETORIC is relatively brief, engagingly written, and passionately argued. It includes chapters on definitions of rhetoric (good and bad), the history of rhetorical studies, the difficulties of judging rhetoric (i.e., the disjunction between instrumental and ethical effectiveness), the dispersal of rhetoric to multiple disciplines and forums, the condition of rhetorical education today, the dangers of bad rhetoric in politics and in the media, and a demonstration of how our many intractable debates might be improved with "listening-rhetoric," using as a case example the "warfare" between science and religion. Throughout, Booth dramatizes his ideal of listening-rhetoric by engaging in frequent proleptic questioning and refutation as well as reflexive commentary.Anyone who heard Booth talk at a conference within the past decade or more has first-hand knowledge of his predilection for neologism, and he indulged himself in this book (though he resisted in 1974; see Modern Dogma, 11n5). His term for bad rhetoric, the rhetoric that exacerbates misunderstanding or seeks victory through deception, is "rhetrickery"; his term for the best rhetoric, a kind of critical consciousness that seeks to find common ground and to remove misunderstanding, is "rhetorology." We are also introduced to LR (listening-rhetoric), WR (win-rhetoric), BR (bargain-rhetoric), Rhet-Ed (rhetorical education), P-Rhet (political rhetoric), and MR (media rhetoric).Rhetorology, or listening-rhetoric, is Booth's solution to our rhetorical woes, a solution that admittedly has both philosophical and practical limitations. Rhetorology opposes rhetrickery and some versions of win-rhetoric. He is at some pains to explain and sequester these damaging capabilities so that the unsavory aspects of rhetoric's reputation do not obscure its positive potential. Readers familiar with recent rhetorical theorizing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.2 (2001) 179-181 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism. James L. Kastely. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 293. $30.00. In Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition, James Kastely presents an alternative to the "standard" rhetorical tradition; he calls this alternative skeptical rhetoric, describes its characteristic activity as (...) refutation, and claims for it special relevance in negotiating postmodern challenges to rhetoric, specifically, that it can serve as a "refutation of postmodernism" (23). This alternative tradition inheres in a canon of works somewhat different from the standard canon, and an examination of key works organizes most of the chapters in this book. To establish and articulate this tradition in the classical era, Kastely examines Plato's Gorgias and Meno, Sophocles' Philoctetes, and Euripides' Hecuba; he then moves to the modern era, and to two works that address themes central to ancient rhetorical skepticism: Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) and Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature? (1949). Finally, Kastely turns to the two prongs of the postmodern reappropriation of traditional rhetoric, the tropological formalism of Paul de Man and the ideological approaches of Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton, challenging both of them with the comic skepticism of Kenneth Burke.The skeptical tradition begins with Socrates, of course. It takes as its central problem, not the impossibility or contingency of knowledge, but the existence of injustice. In a political community, the unavoidability of doing inadvertent injury both requires rhetoric and at the same time makes it party to continued injustice: "[D]oing injury is an inescapable aspect of a being who is born into a world that is shaped by a language and by conventional practices that embody a particular set of values" (42). It is these prior commitments and conventional practices that, Kastely argues, lead us to cause injury. Thus, the positive task of rhetoric is not to persuade others away from injustice or to promote remedies; it is to keep us constantly open to refutation, to the possibility of seeing an alternative to the inadvertent wrong we commit. The inherency of injustice is what makes rhetoric a philosophical problem, but refutation is what rhetoric can offer to philosophy (a claim that might surprise philosophers). And in his reading of the Meno, Kastely argues explicitly for a rhetorical, rather than philosophical or logical, understanding of refutation.Overall, Kastely offers us a Plato who is not the enemy of rhetoric, but rather "the most sophisticated and profound rhetorical theorist" (30), who dramatizes in dialogue the philosophical dilemma of rhetoric. In [End Page 179] Sophocles and Euripides, he finds dramatists who illustrate practical forms the dilemma can take, specifically the problem of the unavailable audience. In the Philoctetes, the problem is how to regain the trust and confidence of the marginalized and disenfranchised, how to restore the status of rhetorical audience to one who no longer believes that justice is possible. In the Hecuba, the problem is how a disempowered rhetor can speak to the powerful. In both plays, but especially in Hecuba, the proximity of rhetoric to violence is a practical consequence of the unsolved philosophical problem.Kastely admits that the skeptical legacy from classical rhetoric has had little effect since antiquity. His argument that this alternate tradition deserves recognition is made primarily by his chapters on Austen and Sartre. He sees the works he examines here as raising a question central to rhetorical skepticism: "Can there be a way of speaking and writing that can effectively challenge the marginalization and dehumanization of people in a world in which traditional structures of authority that made discourse coherent have vanished or, at least, are seriously and irretrievably eroded?" (139-40). Both question Enlightenment assumptions about universality and at the same time confront the vacuum left by the erosion of local communal and authority structures. Austen's "active exploration" of a "crisis in discursive practice" (141) and Sartre's concern with the "social responsibility of the writer" and the loss of a public... (shrink)

In 1966, island biogeographer Sherwin Carlquist published a list of 24 principles governing long-distance dispersal and evolution on islands. The 24 principles describe many aspects of island biology, from long-distance dispersal and establishment to community change and assemblage. Although this was an active period for island biogeography, other models and research garnered much more attention than did Carlquist’s. In this review, over 40 years of support for or against Carlquist’s principles is presented. Recent work has supported most of the 24 (...) principles, and improved methodologies have generally substantiated his initial claims. However, Carlquist’s original work and ideas remain relatively under-represented in the biogeographic literature. Use of philosophical model domains provides one explanation as to why Carlquist’s work has received little attention. Carlquist’s principles are largely natural history tests, and don’t translate well into the theoretical, design of preserves, or the experimental domains—whereas other competing models do well in such domains. (shrink)

As the principle of timing or opportunity,kairos serves both as a powerful theme within technological discourse and as an analytical concept that explains some of the suasory force by which such discourse maintains itself and its position in our culture. This essay makes a case for a rhetoric of technology that is distinct from the rhetoric of science and illustrates the value of the classical vocabulary for understanding contemporary rhetoric. This case is made by examining images and models of technological (...) change that underlie and justify the thematizations ofkairos that appear in so much technological discourse and by exploring the phenomenon of “technological forecasting,” in which the characterization and construction of moments in the present are crucial to the projection of the future. One example of forecasting is examined in detail: the Japanese “Fifth Generation” computer project, which illustrates the twin themes of opportunity and threat. (shrink)

This invaluable resource is the first one-volume, in-depth, comprehensive history of modern science ever published.

In two studies, we explored the frequency and phenomenology of musical imagery. Study 1 used retrospective reports of musical imagery to assess the contribution of individual differences to imagery characteristics. Study 2 used an experience sampling design to assess the phenomenology of musical imagery over the course of one week in a sample of musicians and non-musicians. Both studies found episodes of musical imagery to be common and positive: people rarely wanted such experiences to end and often heard music that (...) was personally meaningful. Several variables predicted musical imagery, including personality, musical preferences, and positive mood. Musicians tended to hear musical imagery more often, but they reported less frequent episodes of deliberately-generated imagery. Taken together, the present research provides new insights into individual differences in musical imagery, and it supports the emerging view that such experiences are common, positive, and more voluntary than previously recognized. (shrink)

Sociocultural norms against women can contribute to promoting intimate partner violence (IPV) and shape women's decision to disclose IPV. A cross‐cultural analysis of the existing literature is needed to present an overview of the influences of sociocultural norms on women's decisions regarding the disclosure of IPV across different cultural contexts. The purpose of the review was to synthesize published quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods (MMs) studies to identify known sociocultural norms across different cultures that may influence women's decision to disclose (...) IPV. The Whittemore and Knafl framework, Rayyan software, and PRISMA flow diagram were used. Databases included APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, PubMed, SocINDEX, and Women's Studies International. The quality of studies was assessed by the MMs appraisal tool. A total of 15 research articles written in English and published in peer‐reviewed journals were included. Main categories emerged: (1) stigma surrounding IPV disclosure, victimization, and divorce; (2) gender roles; (3) preserving family honor; and (4) Children's well‐being and future. A one‐size‐fits‐all approach is not adequate for women who are considering disclosing IPV. Findings underscore that regardless of residing in individualistic countries, those sociocultural norms related to traditional gender roles and gender inequality are still important barriers to the disclosure of IPV among women with collectivist roots. (shrink)

Covid-19 lockdown restrictions constitute a population-wide “life-change event” disrupting normal daily routines. It was proposed that as a result of these lockdown restrictions, physical activity levels would likely decline. However, it could also be argued that lifestyle disruption may result in the formation of increased physical activity habits. Using a longitudinal design, the purpose of this study was to investigate changes in physical activity of different intensities, across individuals who differed in activity levels prior to lockdown restrictions being imposed, and (...) across three time periods: pre-, during- and post-lockdown. This study also examined the extent to which the experience of daily hassles explained any changes in physical activity. A convenience sample recruited through social media, provided data from an online survey administered during weeks 2–3 of a 5-week lockdown and 231 participants provided complete data again 6 weeks post-lockdown. Participants completed the International Physical Activity Questionnaire–Short Form and the Daily Hassles Scale. Results showed that vigorous and moderate intensity PA were significantly lower during- and post-lockdown compared to pre-lockdown in those individuals who had been highly active pre-lockdown. In contrast, for moderately active individuals pre-lockdown, vigorous and moderate intensity PA was significantly higher during-lockdown compared to pre-lockdown, and these increased levels of vigorous PA were maintained post-lockdown. Participants experienced daily hassles due to inner concerns, time pressures, family, and financial concerns to the same extent during- and post-lockdown. Those daily hassles had a small negative predictive effect on post-lockdown PA. It appears that to understand the effect of COVID-19 restrictions on PA, the activity status of individuals pre-lockdown needs to be taken into account. The daily hassles appeared to play a role in post-lockdown PA behavior, but future research should investigate why these results occurred. (shrink)

Despite enthusiasm for patient-centered care, the practice of patient-centered care is proving challenging. Further, it is curious that the literature about this subject does not explicitly address patient autonomy, since patients guide care in patient-centered care, and respect for patient autonomy is a prominent health-care value. We argue that by explicitly adopting a relational conception of autonomy as an essential component, patient-centered care becomes more coherent, is strengthened, and could help practitioners to make better use of a principle of respect (...) for autonomy. Hence, its use appears promising to narrow the theory–practice gap. (shrink)

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) concept is a knowledge assembly and communication tool to facilitate the transparent translation of mechanistic information into outcomes meaningful to the regulatory assessment of chemicals. The AOP framework and associated knowledgebases (KBs) have received significant attention and use in the regulatory toxicology community. However, it is increasingly apparent that the potential stakeholder community for the AOP concept and AOP KBs is broader than scientists and regulators directly involved in chemical safety assessment. In this paper we (...) identify and describe those stakeholders who currently—or in the future—could benefit from the application of the AOP framework and knowledge to specific problems. We also summarize the challenges faced in implementing pathway-based approaches such as the AOP framework in biological sciences, and provide a series of recommendations to meet critical needs to ensure further progression of the framework as a useful, sustainable and dependable tool supporting assessments of both human health and the environment. Although the AOP concept has the potential to significantly impact the organization and interpretation of biological information in a variety of disciplines/applications, this promise can only be fully realized through the active engagement of, and input from multiple stakeholders, requiring multi-pronged substantive long-term planning and strategies. (shrink)

The empirical study of grace, a relational virtue, is in its beginning stages. The purpose of this study was to provide rich, context-based, qualitative data to describe Mainline Protestants’ (a) experiences of, and (b) beliefs about, divine grace. Interviews were conducted with 28 community adults who were affiliated with Mainline Protestant Churches. Results indicated that Mainline Protestant Christians have varying beliefs about divine grace and how it is related to both the present moment and the afterlife. Divine grace was often (...) defined as, or associated with, other relational virtues (e.g., forgiveness and love), and participants occasionally defined grace as a gift. In addition, divine grace was also reported to be difficult to accept at times for a variety of reasons, but the effects of divine grace have direct associations with participants’ overall well-being. Divine grace was also associated with beliefs about heaven or the afterlife, yet participants had varying beliefs about how grace is applied to non-Christians. Limitations and future directions for research are discussed in light of the present empirical literature on divine grace. (shrink)