Researchers have claimed that the absence of a biological father accelerates the daughter’s menarche. This claim was assessed by employing a large and nationally representative sample of Indonesian women. We analyzed 11,138 ever-married women aged 15+ in the Indonesian Family Life Survey 2015. We regressed age at menarche on the interaction of father absence and mother absence at age 12 with or without childhood covariates. For robustness checks, we performed a power analysis, re-ran the same specification for various subgroups, and (...) varied the independent variable of interest. All results produced a null relation between father absence and age at menarche. The power analysis suggests that a false negative was unlikely. Our review of the literature indicates that the claim of the relation between father absence and earlier menarche was based on weak statistical foundations. Other studies with higher-quality datasets tended to find no relation, and our results replicated this tendency. Therefore, the influence of father absence does not appear to be universal. (shrink)

Euthanasia is not legal in Albania, yet there is strong evidence that euthanising a terminally ill patient is not an unknown concept for the Albanians. The first mentioned case of euthanasia is found in 7th century AD mythology and during the communist regime (1944–1989), allegations of euthanising political prisoners and possible rivals in the struggle for power have widely been formulated. There is a trend among relatives and laymen taking care of terminally ill patients to apply tranquilisers in an abusive (...) dosage, or even against medical advice, aiming at sedating the ailing patient. These actions, the refusal to keep on consistently applying life prolonging treatment, and other data, suggest that covert euthanasia is a practice and legal interventions are needed towards formalising it. This might well improve end-of-life care standards, since the inadequacy of structures, such as hospices and residential asylums, is becoming a major drawback in the struggle for dignity and accessible socio-medical help for third age persons and terminal patients. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article aborde les questions soulevées par la circulation des textes des Lumières en Albanie à l’époque où le réalisme socialiste régnait en maître. Après un rappel du contexte politique, l’analyse porte sur les difficultés pour un traducteur de Rousseau de se montrer fidèle aux principes idéologiques d’un État dont l’ambition fut de construire un « homme nouveau ». Si la traduction n’échappe pas à ces impératifs, elle ne peut éviter non plus certains des éléments de la culture albanaise (...) traditionnelle héritée de siècles de domination ottomane. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the convergence of the fundamental theoretical intuitions of two independent currents of Christian philosophy at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Italian Catholic spiritualism and the internally diversified current of the Russian religious philosophical Renaissance proved to be convergent in their ontological realism based on the metaphysics of cognition. This consonance undermines the stereotype about the total difference between the Russian Orthodox and the Western Catholic mentality. The article tries to show that (...) these two denominations both drew inspiration from the Patristic heritage and that, contrary to all appearances, Russian religious philosophy owes much to the Augustinian tradition. The paper reminds the discovery of this convergence made by Vladimir Ern, and discusses certain elements of the teachings of Vladimir Solovyev and Evgenii Troubetzkoy in comparison with the basic philosophical intuitions of the Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini. (shrink)

Previous research has established that goal tracking emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated. However, it has not yet been shown whether young children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time. The current study investigates this by probing young children’s ability to differentiate between goal directed actions that have been halted because the goal was interrupted, and because the goal was abandoned. To test whether children are sensitive to this distinction, we (...) manipulated the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action - his initial goal is either interrupted by an obstacle, or it is abandoned in favour of an alternative. We measure whether children’s helping behaviour is sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action by recording whether they complete the experimenter’s initial goal or the alternative goal. The results showed that children helped complete the experimenter’s initial goal significantly more often after this goal had been interrupted than after it had been abandoned. These results support the hypothesis that children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time by the age of two, and specifically that they differentiate between abandoned and interrupted goals. (shrink)

Sound-symbolism is the nonarbitrary link between the sound and meaning of a word. Japanese-speaking children performed better in a verb generalization task when they were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on existing Japanese sound-symbolic words, than novel nonsound-symbolic verbs (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, & Okada, 2008). A question remained as to whether the Japanese children had picked up regularities in the Japanese sound-symbolic lexicon or were sensitive to universal sound-symbolism. The present study aimed to provide support for the latter. (...) In a verb generalization task, English-speaking 3-year-olds were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on Japanese sound-symbolism, or novel nonsound-symbolic verbs. English-speaking children performed better with the sound-symbolic verbs, just like Japanese-speaking children. We concluded that children are sensitive to universal sound-symbolism and can utilize it in word learning and generalization, regardless of their native language. (shrink)

Background: The Albanian medical system and Albanian health legislation have adopted a paternalistic position with regard to individual decision making. This reflects the practices of a not-so-remote past when state-run facilities and a totalitarian philosophy of medical care were politically imposed. Because of this history, advance directives concerning treatment refusal and do-not-resuscitate decisions are still extremely uncommon in Albania. Medical teams cannot abstain from intervening even when the patient explicitly and repeatedly solicits therapeutic abstinence. The Albanian law on health care (...) has no provisions regarding limits or withdrawal of treatment. This restricts the individual's healthcare choices.DiscussionThe question of 'medically futile' interventions and pointless life-prolonging treatment has been discussed by several authors. Dutch physicians call such interventions 'medisch zinloos' (senseless), and the Netherlands, as one of the first states to legislate on end-of-life situations, actually regulates such issues through appropriate laws. In contrast, leaving an 'advance directive' is not a viable option for Albanian ailing individuals of advanced age. Verbal requests are provided during periods of mental competence, but unfortunately such instructions are rarely taken seriously, and none of them has ever been upheld in a legal or other official forum.SummaryEnd-of-life decisions, treatment refusal and do-not-resuscitate policies are hazardous options in Albania, from the legal point of view. Complying with them involves significant risk on the part of the physician. Culturally, the application of such instructions is influenced from a mixture of religious beliefs, death coping-behaviors and an immense confusion concerning the role of proxies as decision-makers. Nevertheless, Albanian tradition is familiar with the notion of 'amanet', a sort of living will that mainly deals the property and inheritance issues. Such living wills, verbally transmitted, may in certain cases include advance directives regarding end-of-life decisions of the patient including refusal or termination of futile medical treatments. Since these living wills are never formally and legally validated, their application is impossible and treatment refusal remains still non practicable. Tricks to avoid institutional treatment under desperate conditions are used, aiming to provide legal coverage for medical teams and relatives that in extreme situations comply with the advice of withholding senseless treatment. (shrink)

In order to produce a coherent narrative, speakers must identify the characters in the tale so that listeners can figure out who is doing what to whom. This paper explores whether speakers use gesture, as well as speech, for this purpose. English speakers were shown vignettes of two stories and asked to retell the stories to an experimenter. Their speech and gestures were transcribed and coded for referent identification. A gesture was considered to identify a referent if it was produced (...) in the same location as the previous gesture for that referent. We found that speakers frequently used gesture location to identify referents. Interestingly, however, they used gesture most often to identify referents that were also uniquely specified in speech. Lexical specificity in referential expressions in speech thus appears to go hand‐in‐hand with specification in referential expressions in gesture. (shrink)

We examined whether children's ability to integrate speech and gesture follows the pattern of a broader developmental shift between 3- and 5-year-old children regarding the ability to process two pieces of information simultaneously. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults were presented with either an iconic gesture or a spoken sentence or a combination of the two on a computer screen, and they were instructed to select a photograph that best matched the message. The 3-year-olds did not integrate information in (...) speech and gesture, but 5-year-olds and adults did. In Experiment 2, 3-year-old children were presented with the same speech and gesture as in Experiment 1 that were produced live by an experimenter. When presented live, 3-year-olds could integrate speech and gesture. We concluded that development of the integration ability is a part of the broader developmental shift; however, live-presentation facilitates the nascent integration ability in 3-year-olds. (shrink)

Previous research has established that goal tracking emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated. However, it has not yet been shown whether young children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time. The current study investigates this by probing young children’s (24-30 months old) ability to differentiate between goal directed actions that have been halted because the goal was interrupted, and because the goal was abandoned. To test whether children are sensitive to (...) this distinction, we manipulated the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action - his initial goal is either interrupted by an obstacle, or it is abandoned in favour of an alternative. We measure whether children’s helping behaviour is sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action by recording whether they complete the experimenter’s initial goal or the alternative goal. The results showed that children (n = 24) helped complete the experimenter’s initial goal significantly more often after this goal had been interrupted than after it had been abandoned. These results support the hypothesis that children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time by the age of two, and specifically that they differentiate between abandoned and interrupted goals. (shrink)

Written at the height of the purges, but unpublished for decades, Megrelidze's text is arguably the most significant, erudite and wide-ranging work of Marxist philosophy written in the USSR at the time. Discussing the emergence and development of human consciousness from the origins of humanity to the rise of capitalism, Megrelidze discusses the major achievements of contemporary cognitive science, sociology, philosophy and linguistics in the light of the works of Marx and Engels that were being published at the time. Far (...) from the rigidities of official 'diamat', the book provides an insight into the important debates in Soviet intellectual life that led to the works of figures such as Vygotsky and the 'Bakhtin Circle'. (shrink)

The negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’ psychosocial functioning was widely attested during the last year. However, the extent to which individual differences are associated with adaptive and maladaptive outcomes during quarantine in Italy remains largely unexplored. Using a person-oriented approach, the present study explored the association of personality profiles, based on three broad individual dispositions and two self-efficacy beliefs in the emotional area, with adaptive and maladaptive outcomes during the first Italian lockdown. In doing so, we focused (...) also on how different age groups differently faced the pandemic. The study was conducted through an online survey from May to June 2020 and included 1341 participants living in Italy, divided into two groups: 737 young adults aged 18–35 and 604 adults aged 36–60 years old. Latent Profile Analysis identified three personality profiles: resilient, vulnerable, and moderate. A subsequent path analysis model showed that the resilient profile was positively associated with prosocial behavior as an indicator of adaptive outcome, and negatively associated with three maladaptive outcomes: interpersonal aggression, depressive symptoms, and anxiety problems. Contrarily, the vulnerable profile resulted negatively associated with prosocial behavior and positively associated with the three maladaptive outcomes. Finally, regarding age group differences, young adults belonging to the vulnerable profile showed a greater association especially with interpersonal aggression, depression, and anxiety problems, as compared to adults belonging to the same profile. Overall, the results of the present study highlighted the importance to analyze individual functioning during an isolation period by using a person-oriented approach. Findings evidenced the existence of three different profiles and subsequent path analysis revealed, especially for the vulnerable profile and young adults, a greater maladaptive consequence of the quarantine. The practical implications will be discussed. (shrink)

Background: Sharing of tissue samples for research and disease surveillance purposes has become increasingly important. While it is clear that this is an area of intense, international controversy, there is an absence of data about what researchers themselves and those involved in the transfer of samples think about these issues, particularly in developing countries. Methods: A survey was carried out in a number of Asian countries and in Egypt to explore what researchers and others involved in research, storage and transfer (...) of human tissue samples thought about some of the issues related to sharing of such samples. Results: The results demonstrated broad agreement with the positions taken by developing countries in the current debate, favoring quite severe restrictions on the use of samples by developed countries. Conclusions: It is recommended that an international agreement is developed on what conditions should be attached to any sharing of human tissue samples across borders. (shrink)

A considerable body of research has documented the emergence of what appears to be instrumental helping behavior in early childhood. The current study tested the hypothesis that one basic psychological mechanism motivating this behavior is a preference for completing unfinished actions. To test this, a paradigm was implemented in which 2-year-olds (n = 34, 16 female/18 male, mostly White middle-class children) could continue an adult’s action when the adult no longer wanted to complete the action. The results showed that children (...) continued the adult’s actions more often when the goal had been abandoned than when it had been reached (OR = 2.37). This supports the hypothesis that apparent helping behavior in 2-year-olds is motivated by a preference for completing unfinished actions. (shrink)

A considerable body of research has documented the emergence of what appears to be instrumental helping behavior in early childhood. The current study tested the hypothesis that one basic psychological mechanism motivating this behavior is a preference for completing unfinished actions. To test this, a paradigm was implemented in which 2-year-olds (n = 34, 16 female/18 male, mostly White middle-class children) could continue an adult’s action when the adult no longer wanted to complete the action. The results showed that children (...) continued the adult’s actions more often when the goal had been abandoned than when it had been reached (OR = 2.37). This supports the hypothesis that apparent helping behavior in 2-year-olds is motivated by a preference for completing unfinished actions. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

Das Kitāb Sidrat al-muntahā des Pseudo-Ibn Waḥšīya: Einleitung, Edition und Übersetzung eines hermetisch-allegorischen Traktats zur Alchemie. By Christopher Braun. Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, vol. 327. Berlin: Klaus Schwartz, 2016. Pp. 160. €39.80.

Kitāb Shifāʾ al-asqām al-ʿāriḍa fī l-ẓāhir wa-l-bāṭin min al-ajsām li-l shaykh sayyid Aḥmad b. ʿUmar al-Raqqādī al-Kuntī. Edited by Floréal Sanagustin. VECMAS. 3 vols. Lyons: ENS Éditions, 2011. Pp. v + 167 ; v + 147 ; iv + 133.