Body care is considered a key aspect of nursing and imperative for the health, wellbeing, and dignity of older people. In Scandinavian countries, body care as a professional practice has undergone considerable changes, bringing new understandings, values, and dilemmas into nursing. A systematic mapping review was conducted with the aims of identifying and mapping international nursing research on body care of older people in different institutionalized settings in the healthcare system and to critically discuss the dominant assumptions within the research (...) by adapting a problematization approach. Most identified papers reported on empirical research with a biomedical approach focusing on outcome and effectiveness. Conceptual papers, papers with a focus on the perspectives of the older people, or contextual and material aspects were lacking. The research field is dominated by four dominant assumptions: Body care as an evidence‐based practice, body care as a relational ethical practice, the body as a body‐object and a body‐subject, the objects in the body care practices as nonrelational materialities. Given the complexities of professional body care practices, there is a need for other research designs and theoretical perspectives within nursing that expand our understanding of body care taking into consideration the multiple social and material realities. (shrink)

This chapter develops a perceptual solution to the epistemological problem of other minds, relying on central ideas from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The Merleau-Pontian account is contrasted with another attempted perceptual solution to the other minds problem, and it is argued that only the former meets the phenomenologists' desideratum of providing an alternative to inferential solutions. The chapter also provides responses to various objections to the perceptual solution, including a pair of objections recently put forward by Alec Hyslop.

Mental time travel is the ability to mentally project oneself backward in time to relive past experiences and forward in time to pre-live possible future experiences. Previous work has focused on MTT in its voluntary form. Here, we introduce the notion of involuntary MTT. We examined involuntary versus voluntary and past versus future MTT in a diary study. We found that involuntary future event representations—defined as representations of possible personal future events that come to mind with no preceding search attempts—were (...) as common as involuntary autobiographical memories and similar to them regarding cuing and subjective qualities. Future MTT involved more positive and idyllic representations than past MTT. MTT into the distant future/past involved more representations of cultural life script events than MTT into the immediate past/future. The findings are discussed in relation to cultural learning and MTT considered as a higher mental process. (shrink)

Subliminal perception (SP) is today considered a well-supported theory stating that perception can occur without conscious awareness and have a significant impact on later behaviour and thought. In this article, we first present and discuss different approaches to the study of SP. In doing this, we claim that most approaches are based on a dichotomic measure of awareness. Drawing upon recent advances and discussions in the study of introspection and phenomenological psychology, we argue for both the possibility and necessity of (...) using an elaborated measure of subjective states. In the second part of the article, we present findings where these considerations are implemented in an empirical study. The results and implications are discussed in detail, both with reference to SP, and in relation to the more general problem of using elaborate introspective reports as data in relation to studies of cognition. (shrink)

The problem of other minds has a distinguished philosophical history stretching back more than two hundred years. Taken at face value, it is an epistemological question: it concerns how we can have knowledge of, or at least justified belief in, the existence of minds other than our own. In recent decades, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and primatologists have debated a related question: how we actually go about attributing mental states to others (regardless of whether we ever achieve knowledge or rational (...) justification in this domain). Until the mid-nineties, the latter debate – which sometimes goes under the name of the “mindreading” debate – was characterized by a fairly clear-cut opposition between two theoretical outlooks: “theory-theory” (TT) and “simulation theory” (ST). Theory-theorists typically argued that we attribute mental states to others on the basis of a “theory of mind” that is either constructed in early infancy and subsequently revised and modified (Gopnik 1996), or else is the result of maturation of innate mindreading “modules” (Baron-Cohen 1995). (shrink)

We investigated whether memories are selected for the life story based on event characteristics. Sixty-one students completed weekly diaries over their first term at university. They described, dated and rated two events each week. Three months after the end of the term they completed an unexpected memory test. They recalled three memories from the diary period that were important to their life story. Three randomly selected events scoring low on importance to the life story functioned as control memories. Life story (...) memories were rated higher on goal relevance, emotional intensity, importance and rehearsal in the diary and maintained their higher ratings at the test session, while ratings for control memories dropped off. Life story memories’ content was less consistent over time but they were more accurately dated than control memories. The results suggest that event characteristics play an important role for the selection of life story memories. (shrink)

A number of recent publications have argued that a scientific approach to consciousness needs a rigorous approach to first-person data collection. As mainstream experimental psychology has long abandoned such introspective or phenomenological method, there is at present no generally agreed upon method for first-person data collection in experimental consciousness studies. There are, however, a number of recent articles that all claim to provide a unique contribution to such a methodology. This article reviews these suggestions and extracts their core features. It (...) is argued that the suggested methods are generally overlapping and compatible, and a number of concrete methods that easily are applied to experimental studies are put forward. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that awareness comes in degrees, and we propose a novel multi-factor account that spans both subjective experiences and perceptual representations. At the subjective level, we argue that conscious experiences can be degraded by being fragmented, less salient, too generic, or flash-like. At the representational level, we identify corresponding features of perceptual representations—their availability for working memory, intensity, precision, and stability—and argue that the mechanisms that affect these features are what ultimately modulate the degree of awareness. (...) We conclude the paper by demonstrating why the original interpretations of certain empirical findings that apparently pose problems for our account are, in fact, flawed. (shrink)

Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements and continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today. The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject, and essential reading for any student or scholar of phenomenology. Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five clear parts: main figures in the phenomenological movement, from Brentano to (...) Derrida main topics in phenomenology phenomenological contributions to philosophy phenomenological intersections historical postscript. Close attention is paid to the core topics in phenomenology such as intentionality, perception, subjectivity, the self, the body, being and phenomenological method. An important feature of the Companion is its examination of how phenomenology has contributed to central disciplines in philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of religion as well as disciplines beyond philosophy such as race, cognitive science, psychiatry, literary criticism and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Mental time travel is the ability to mentally project oneself into one’s personal past or future, in terms of memories of past events or projections of possible future events. We investigated the frequency and valence of involuntary MTT in the context of high trait worry. High and low worriers recorded the frequency and valence of involuntary memories and future projections using a structured notebook and completed measures probing individual differences related to negative affectivity. Involuntary future projections were as frequent as (...) involuntary memories. We found a positivity bias for both past and future MTT, in that fewer negative events were reported than positive or neutral ones. This positivity bias was greater for future than for past events. Individual differences related to negative affectivity were positively associated with the proportion of negative events, indicating a reduced positivity bias in individuals with a general tendency to experience negative affect. (shrink)

What is the best way of assessing the extent to which people are aware of a stimulus? Here, using a masked visual identification task, we compared three measures of subjective awareness: The Perceptual Awareness Scale , through which participants are asked to rate the clarity of their visual experience; confidence ratings , through which participants express their confidence in their identification decisions, and Post-decision wagering , in which participants place a monetary wager on their decisions. We conducted detailed explorations of (...) the relationships between awareness and identification performance, looking to determine which scale best correlates with performance, and whether we can detect performance in the absence of awareness and how the scales differ from each other in terms of revealing such unconscious processing. Based on these findings we discuss whether perceptual awareness should be considered graded or dichotomous. Results showed that PAS showed a much stronger performance-awareness correlation than either CR or PDW, particularly for low stimulus intensities. In general, all scales indicated above-chance performance when participants claimed not to have seen anything. However, such above-chance performance only showed when we also observed a correlation between awareness and performance. Thus PAS seems to be the most exhaustive measure of awareness, and we find support for above-chance performance in the absence of subjective awareness, but such unconscious knowledge only contributes to performance when we observe conscious knowledge as well. Similarities and differences between scales are discussed in the light of consciousness theories and response strategies. (shrink)

There is no doubt that episodic memory serves communicative functions, but Mahr & Csibra overlook that this is not the only function served by memories of past events. Autobiographical memory research has identified several other functions, including purely directive functions. The functionality of episodic memory is not stable across situations; it varies dynamically with the demands of the retrieval context.

Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements and continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today. _The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology_ is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject, and essential reading for any student or scholar of phenomenology. Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Companion_ is divided into five clear parts: main figures in the phenomenological movement, from Brentano to (...) Derrida main topics in phenomenology phenomenological contributions to philosophy phenomenological intersections historical postscript. Close attention is paid to the core topics in phenomenology such as intentionality, perception, subjectivity, the self, the body, being and phenomenological method. An important feature of the _Companion_ is its examination of how phenomenology has contributed to central disciplines in philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of religion as well as disciplines beyond philosophy such as race, cognitive science, psychiatry, literary criticism and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Involuntary autobiographical memories are spontaneously arising memories of personal events, whereas voluntary memories are retrieved strategically. Voluntary remembering has been studied in numerous experiments while involuntary remembering has been largely ignored. It is generally assumed that voluntary recall is the standard way of remembering, whereas involuntary recall is the exception. However, little is known about the actual frequency of these two types of remembering in daily life. Here, 48 Danish undergraduates recorded their involuntary versus voluntary autobiographical memories during a day (...) using a mechanical counter. Involuntary memories were reported three times as frequently as voluntary memories. Compared to voluntary memories, they were associated less with problem solving and social sharing and more with day dreaming, periods of boredom, no reasons for remembering and predominantly came to mind during unfocused attention. The findings suggest that involuntary recall is a typical way of accessing the personal past. (shrink)

The volume provides clear and comprehensive coverage of the main methodological debates and approaches within philosophy. The book gives equal weight to analytical and continental approaches, and pays attention to approaches that are often overlooked.

This study compares involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories in depressed and never depressed individuals. Twenty depressed and twenty never depressed individuals completed a memory diary; recording their reactions to 10 involuntary and 10 voluntary memories over 14–30 days. Psychiatric status , psychopathology, rumination and avoidance were assessed. For both groups, involuntary memories more frequently lead to strong reactions than voluntarily memories. For both modes of retrieval, depressed individuals reported more frequent negative reactions than never depressed individuals and rated memories as (...) more central to identity with higher levels of rumination and avoidance. Depressed individuals retrieved both positive and negative memories during involuntary retrieval. These findings support the view that involuntary memory retrieval represents a basic mode of retrieval during healthy and disordered cognition, and that during depression, both involuntary and voluntary memories are central to identity and associated with rumination and avoidance. (shrink)

In Jacobsen, M.H. (ed.): Sociologies of the Unnoticed. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008.

Ethnic minority patients have been discussed and problematised in Western health literature. Drawing on an interpretation of central parts of the French philosopher Michel Foucault's authorship, we analysed a broad selection of materials to identify mechanisms through which the truth about ethnic minority patients is constructed. We identified a single, yet consistent discursive strategy that we termed ‘figure of inconvenience’ in which ethnic minority patients were classified and assigned a specific subjection illustrating them as ‘inconvenient’ to the nurse's practice. Concurrently, (...) their relatives were afforded the position of substitutes. The discourse exemplifies how the behaviour or appearances of ethnic minority patients cannot be reconciled with the traits of ethnic Danish patients. Finally, we discussed implications that such a strategy may have for the provision of healthcare services for ethnic minority patients in Denmark. (shrink)

A comprehensive understanding of the cerebrospinal fluid system is essential for our understanding of health and disease within the central nervous system. The system of CSF refers to all components involved in CSF production, movement, and absorption. In recent years, extensive research has resulted in vastly improved understanding of the CSF system in health and disease. Yet, several aspects remain to be fully clarified, notably along the spinal cord as the preponderance of research has focused on the brain. This review (...) briefly summarizes the CSF system and its implications for CNS diseases and highlights the knowledge gaps that require further research. (shrink)

Toddlerhood is characterized by rapid development in several domains, such as language, socio-emotional behavior and emerging math skills all of which are important precursors of school readiness. However, little is known about how these skills develop over time and how they may be interrelated. The current study investigates young children’s development at two time points, with about 7 months in between, assessing their language, socio-emotional and math language and numeracy skills with teacher ratings. The sample includes 577 children from 18 (...) until 36 months of age of 86 childcare classrooms. The results of the autoregressive path analyses showed moderate to strong stability of language, socio-emotional and math language and numeracy skills, although the magnitude of associations was smaller for the latter. The cross-lagged path analyses highlighted the importance of language and socio-emotional skills for development in the other domains. Differential relations were found for the autoregressive and cross-lagged paths depending on gender and age. Language skills appeared a stronger predictor of boys’ socio-emotional and math language and numeracy skill development compared to girls. Girls’ socio-emotional skills predicted growth in math. For boys, socio-emotional and math language and numeracy skills appeared to be unrelated. Language skills showed stronger relations with the development of math language and numeracy skills for younger children as compared to older children. Also, for older children math language and numeracy skills negatively predicted growth in their socio-emotional skills. The findings provide more insights in how language, math language and numeracy skills and socio-emotional skills co-develop in the early years and as such have important implications for interventions aimed to support children’s development. (shrink)

We describe a patient LS, profoundly deaf in both ears from birth, with underdeveloped superior temporal gyri. Without hearing aids, LS displays no ability to detect sounds below a fixed threshold of 60 dBs, which classifies him as clinically deaf. Under these no-hearing-aid conditions, when presented with a forced-choice paradigm in which he is asked to consciously respond, he is unable to make above-chance judgments about the presence or location of sounds. However, he is able to make above-chance judgments about (...) the content of sounds presented to him under forced-choice conditions. We demonstrated that LS has faint sensations from auditory stimuli, but questionable awareness of auditory content. LS thus has a form of type-2 deaf hearing with respect to auditory content. As in the case of a subject with acquired deafness and deaf hearing reported on a previous occasion, LS’s condition of deaf hearing is akin in some respects to type-2 blindsight. As for the case of type 2 blindsight the case indicates that a form of conscious hearing can arise in the absence of a fully developed auditory cortex. (shrink)

In a recent article, [Sergent, C. & Dehaene, S. . Is consciousness a gradual phenomenon? Evidence for an all-or-none bifurcation during the attentional blink, Psychological Science, 15, 720–729] claim to give experimental support to the thesis that there is a clear transition between conscious and unconscious perception. This idea is opposed to theoretical arguments that we should think of conscious perception as a continuum of clarity, with e.g., fringe conscious states [Mangan, B. . Sensation’s ghost—the non-sensory “fringe” of consciousness, Psyche, (...) 7, 18]. In the experimental study described in this article, we find support for this opposite notion that we should have a parsimonious account of conscious perception. Our reported finding relates to the hypothesis that there is more than one perceptual threshold [Merikle, P.M., Smilek, D. & Eastwood, J.D. . Perception without awareness: perspectives from cognitive psychology, Cognition, 79, 115–134], but goes further to argue that there are different “levels” of conscious perception. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of approaches to social cognition research have emerged that highlight the importance of embodied interaction for social cognition (Reddy, How infants know minds, 2008; Gallagher, J Conscious Stud 8:83–108, 2001; Fuchs and Jaegher, Phenom Cogn Sci 8:465–486, 2009; Hutto, in Seemans (ed.) Joint attention: new developments in psychology, philosophy of mind and social neuroscience, 2012). Proponents of such ‘interactionist’ approaches emphasize the importance of embodied responses that are engaged in online social interaction, and which, according (...) to interactionists, present an alternative to mindreading as a source of social understanding. We agree that it is important to take embodied interaction seriously, but do not agree that this presents a fundamental challenge to mainstream mindreading approaches. Drawing upon an analogy between embodied interaction and the exercise of expert skills, we advocate a hierarchical view which claims that embodied social responses generally operate in close conjunction with higher-level cognitive processes that play a coordinative role, and which are often sensitive to mental states. Thus, investigation of embodied responses should inform rather than conflict with research on mindreading. (shrink)

Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements and continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today. _The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology_ is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject, and essential reading for any student or scholar of phenomenology. Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Companion_ is divided into five clear parts: main figures in the phenomenological movement, from Brentano to (...) Derrida main topics in phenomenology phenomenological contributions to philosophy phenomenological intersections historical postscript. Close attention is paid to the core topics in phenomenology such as intentionality, perception, subjectivity, the self, the body, being and phenomenological method. An important feature of the _Companion_ is its examination of how phenomenology has contributed to central disciplines in philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of religion as well as disciplines beyond philosophy such as race, cognitive science, psychiatry, literary criticism and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

What is philosophy? How should we do it? Why should we bother to? These are the kinds of questions addressed by metaphilosophy - the philosophical study of the nature of philosophy itself. Students of philosophy today are faced with a confusing and daunting array of philosophical methods, approaches and styles and also deep divisions such as the notorious rift between analytic and Continental philosophy. This book takes readers through a full range of approaches - analytic versus Continental, scientistic versus humanistic, (...) 'pure' versus applied - enabling them to locate and understand these different ways of doing philosophy. Clearly and accessibly written, it will stimulate reflection on philosophical practice and will be invaluable for students of philosophy and other philosophically inclined readers. (shrink)

A compelling new approach to the problem that has haunted twentieth century philosophy in both its analytical and continental shapes. No other book addresses as thoroughly the parallels between Wittgenstein and leading Continental philosophers such as Levinas, Husserl, and Heidegger.

A compelling new approach to the problem that has haunted twentieth century philosophy in both its analytical and continental shapes. No other book addresses as thoroughly the parallels between Wittgenstein and leading Continental philosophers such as Levinas, Husserl, and Heidegger.

Proponents of the so-called “interactive turn in social cognition research” maintain that mainstream research on social cognition has been fundamentally flawed by its neglect of social interaction, and that a new paradigm is needed in order to redress this shortcoming. We argue that proponents of the interactive turn (“interactionists”) have failed to properly substantiate their criticisms of existing research on social cognition. Although it is sometimes unclear precisely what these criticisms of existing theories are supposed to target, we sketch two (...) possibilities: interactionists can either accept the primary explanandum addressed by mainstream social cognition research—namely mindreading—and claim that interactionism contributes some hitherto neglected but necessary component of a successful explanans, or they can argue that mainstream research has focused on a misconceived explanandum. We argue that interactionist claims of both sorts are problematic. (shrink)