Recently, psychological phenomena have been expanded to new domains, crisscrossing boundaries of organizational levels, with the emergence of areas such as social personality and ecosystem learning. In this contribution, we analyze the ascription of an individual-based concept (personality) to the social level. Although justified boundary crossings can boost new approaches and applications, the indiscriminate misuse of concepts refrains the growth of scientific areas. The concept of social personality is based mainly on the detection of repeated group differences across a population, (...) in a direct transposition of personality concepts from the individual to the social level. We show that this direct transposition is problematic for avowing the nonsensical ascription of personality even to simple electronic devices. To go beyond a metaphoric use of social personality, we apply the organizational approach to a review of social insect communication networks. Our conceptual analysis shows that socially self-organized systems, such as isolated ant trails and bee’s recruitment groups, are too simple to have social personality. The situation is more nuanced when measuring the collective choice between nest sites or foraging patches: some species show positive and negative feedbacks between two or more self-organized social structures so that these co-dependent structures are inter-related by second-order, social information systems, complying with a formal requirement for having social personality: the social closure of constraints. Other requirements include the decoupling between individual and social dynamics, and the self-regulation of collective decision processes. Social personality results to be sometimes a metaphorical transposition of a psychological concept to a social phenomenon. The application of this organizational approach to cases of learning ecosystems, or evolutionary learning, could help to ground theoretically the ascription of psychological properties to levels of analysis beyond the individual, up to meta-populations or ecological communities. (shrink)

In the book The Insect Societies, Wilson proposed categories of sociality that were presented as a landmark unification of terminology in the study of social behavior. Since then, many new behavioral patterns have been described, but they could not be fitted into any of the available categories, undermining the consensus around that well-established classification. New general classifications tried to circumvent the limitations shown by Wilson’s categorization, but with little success. Among the proposals, some maintain the form of discrete categorization, while (...) others advance a quantitative model to characterize sociality. These proposals have failed to clarify the use of the categories of sociality, and none of them has become widely accepted or overcome the problems faced by the classification of social behaviors. Here we explore whether an analysis of types of concepts proposed by Carnap can help to move forward in this discussion. His distinction between qualitative concepts and quantitative concepts is used here as an epistemological basis for analyzing the development of the proposed conceptual changes and classifications of sociality. Recently, social behavior has come to be considered a complex phenomenon, and quantitative concepts could bring a lot of informative data to understanding its development and perhaps its evolution. We conclude that a new metric of sociality should be built, using characteristics that are nonarbitrary, evolutionarily meaningful, and amenable to comparing all social animals. Finally, we advocate for an integrative view of social complexity based on individuals’ interactions as a useful metric of sociality. This approach still needs further development. (shrink)

If we are to ensure the persistence of species in an increasingly warm world, of interest is the identification of drivers that affect the ability of an organism to resist thermal stress. Underpinning any organism's capacity for resistance is a complex interplay between biological and physical factors occurring over multiple scales. Tropical coral reefs are a unique system, in that their function is dependent upon the maintenance of a coral–algal symbiosis that is directly disrupted by increases in water temperature. A (...) number of physical factors have been identified as affecting the biological responses of the coral organism under broadscale thermal anomalies. One such factor is water flow, which is capable of modulating both organismal metabolic functioning and thermal environments. Understanding the physiological and hydrodynamic drivers of organism response to thermal stress improves predictive capabilities and informs targeted management responses, thereby increasing the resilience of reefs into the future. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractDriving patterns of coral bleaching over reefs are a suite of biophysical interactions where the physical environment modulates organism response through an interplay with intrinsic biological functioning. Flow conditions over reefs can mitigate the physiological impacts of thermal stress across multiple spatial scales. More details can be found in article number 1800226 by Charlotte E. Page et al., Seeking Resistance in Coral Reef Ecosystems: The Interplay of Biophysical Factors and Bleaching Resistance under a Changing Climate, DOI: 10.1002/bies.201800226.

Studies of Y chromosome evolution often emphasize gene loss, but this loss has been counterbalanced by addition of new genes. The DAZ genes, which are critical to human spermatogenesis, were acquired by the Y chromosome in the ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes. We and our colleagues recently sequenced the rhesus macaque Y chromosome, and comparison of this sequence to human and chimpanzee enables us to reconstruct much of the evolutionary history of DAZ. We report that DAZ arrived on (...) the Y chromosome about 38 million years ago via the transposition of at least 1.1 megabases of autosomal DNA. This transposition also brought five additional genes to the Y chromosome, but all five genes were subsequently lost through mutation or deletion. As the only surviving gene, DAZ experienced extensive restructuring, including intragenic amplification and gene duplication, and has been the target of positive selection in the chimpanzee lineage.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays Should Y stay or should Y go: The evolution of non‐recombining sex chromosomes Abstract. (shrink)

Coral bleaching has impacted reefs worldwide and the predictions of near‐annual bleaching from over two decades ago have now been realized. While technology currently provides the means to predict large‐scale bleaching, predicting reef‐scale and within‐reef patterns in real‐time for all reef users is limited. In 2020, heat stress across the Great Barrier Reef underpinned the region's third bleaching event in 5 years. Here we review the heterogeneous emergence of bleaching across Heron Island reef habitats and discuss the oceanographic drivers that (...) underpinned variable bleaching emergence. We do so as a case study to highlight how reef end‐user groups who engage with coral reefs in different ways require targeted guidance for how, and when, to alter their use of coral reefs in response to bleaching events. Our case study of coral bleaching emergence demonstrates how within‐reef scale nowcasting of coral bleaching could aid the development of accessible and equitable bleaching response strategies on coral reefs. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/N9Tgb8N-vN0. (shrink)

Self-harm is a potentially lethal symptom of borderline personality disorder (BPD) that often improves with dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). While DBT is effective for reducing self-harm in many patients with BPD, a small but significant number of patients either does not improve in treatment or ends treatment prematurely. Accordingly, it is crucial to identify factors that may prospectively predict which patients are most likely to benefit from and remain in treatment. In the present preliminary study, twenty-nine actively self-harming patients with (...) BPD completed brain-imaging procedures probing activation of the prefrontal cortex during impulse control prior to beginning DBT and after seven months of treatment. Patients that reduced their frequency of self-harm the most over treatment displayed lower levels of neural activation in the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex prior to beginning treatment, and they showed the greatest increases in activity within this region after seven months of treatment. Prior to starting DBT, treatment non-completers demonstrated greater activation than treatment-completers in the medial prefrontal cortex and right inferior frontal gyrus. Reductions in self-harm over the treatment period were associated with increases in activity in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex even after accounting for improvements in depression, mania, and BPD symptom severity. These findings suggest that pre-treatment patterns of activation in the prefrontal cortex underlying impulse control may be prospectively associated with improvements in self-harm and treatment attrition for patients with BPD treated with DBT. (shrink)

F. N. Sibley; VIII—Colours, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 68, Issue 1, 1 June 1968, Pages 145–166, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/68.1.1.

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 436-458, Winter 2021.

F N Dunlop; Education and Human Nature, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 4, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 21–44, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.197.

Accession Number: ATLA0001712247; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 488-502.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 501-502.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

R F Dearden; Play and Pleasure, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 37–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1971.tb0044.

ABSTRACT Benjamin Page's thoughtful critique of my book, The Illusion of Public Opinion, strives to reassure readers that all is well—despite the book's extensive documentation of measurement‐error artifacts in numerous public opinion surveys. Page's own careful polling practices are not followed outside of elite academic survey centers. Moreover, even in such well‐run surveys, the respondents are often ignorant of the issues being probed. The fact that nonrandom reasons of some sort must be determining on‐the‐spot survey responses may allow (...) us to call the respondents “rational” in a loose sense. But the responses still don't represent actual opinions about the specific policy issues being probed—let alone well‐informed answers. Finally, while Page argues that measurement errors are most likely random, and should cancel out in the aggregate, the “miracle of aggregation” doesn't occur when the form, wording, and context of questions varies from survey to survey. And even when wording and context are held constant, the respondents' understanding of the same words can vary dramatically or subtly over time, due to new political events and their changing interpretation. (shrink)

With calls for (business) leaders to contribute to greater global fairness and social justice (BAWB 2006; Maak and Pless Journal of Business Ethics, 88, 537–550, 2009), this paper considers gender equality on University home web page images as one means of communicating equal access to leadership roles for both men and women. Although there are many paths for leadership development, one important purpose of Universities is to create people who will potentially become leaders in our society (Shapiro 2005). We (...) analyzed the home web pages at 24 leading universities to identify implicit messages about gender roles, building on implicit leadership theory and leadership prototypes. Using an adapted version of Goffman’s frame analysis (1979), our results suggest depiction of gender equality in university home web pages, in contrast to studies of print advertisements (cf., Kang Sex Roles, 37(11/12), 979–996, 1997; Lindner Sex Roles, 51(7/8), 409–421, 2004). Our results also identify specific opportunities to depict greater equity and to continue to expand the potential for both women and men to be seen as being capable and belonging on this leadership path. (shrink)

F. S. McNeilly; XIII—Immorality and the Law, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 1966, Pages 167–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.

F. E. Sparshott; IV—Avowals and their Uses, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 63–76, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

F. C. Copleston; XIV*—The Logical Empiricism of Nicholas of Autrecourt, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 249–262.

Resumen Al menos desde la publicación del clásico Ética en el Congreso. De la corrupción individual a la institucional de Dennis F. Thompson, el concepto de corrupción institucional ha recibido gran atención. Este tipo de corrupción se diferencia de la corrupción personal en que, entre otras cosas, la última requiere de la existencia de motivos morales personales. En este artículo exploro esta distinción y hago algunas observaciones críticas a la manera en la que Thompson la ha recientemente elaborado.At least from (...) the publication of Dennis F. Thompson’s classic Ethics in Congress. From Individual to Institutional Corruption the concept of institutional corruption has received great attention. This type of corruption is different from personal corruption in that, among other things, the latter requires the existence of personal moral motives. In this article I explore this distinction and raise some critical observations to the way in which Thompson has recently elaborated it. (shrink)