This paper develops and extends the concept of ecological identity work through an investigation of issues of identity among students studying the environment at one US university. We conceptualize identity work as both an individual and group process through which students locate themselves in relation to particular, relatively preformed ecological identities, while also attempting to redefine the boundaries of ecological identity itself. Using interview and participant observation data we ask what kinds of ecological identity work takes place among students and (...) who is involved in defining and policing ecological identities. We argue that this approach can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between environmental education, philosophy and action. (shrink)

This volume presents the concept of Ecoscape as spatial interrelations, or spatially patterned processes, that are constitutive of an environment_an ecosystem. Contributors investigate environmental issues concerning the human impact on geohistory, food distribution, genetically modified biota, waste management, scientific mapping, and the rethinking of human identity.

ObjectiveMost young adults diagnosed with breast or gynecologic cancers experience adverse reproductive or sexual health outcomes due to cancer and its treatment. However, evidence-based interventions that specifically address the RSH concerns of young adult and/or LGBTQ+ survivor couples are lacking. Our goal is to develop a feasible and acceptable couple-based intervention to reduce reproductive and sexual distress experience by young adult breast and gynecologic cancer survivor couples with diverse backgrounds.MethodsWe systematically adapted an empirically supported, theoretically grounded couple-based intervention to address (...) the RSH concerns of young couples coping with breast or gynecologic cancer through integration of stakeholder perspectives. We interviewed 11 couples with a history of breast or gynecologic cancer to review and pretest intervention materials. Three of these couples were invited to review and comment on intervention modifications. Content experts in RSH and dyadic coping, clinicians, and community advisors participated throughout the adaptation process.ResultsFindings confirmed the need for an online, couple-based intervention to support young couples experiencing RSH concerns after breast or gynecologic cancer. Qualitative themes suggested intervention preferences for: A highly flexible intervention that can be tailored to couples’ specific RSH concerns; Active steps to help members of a dyad “get on the same page” in their relationship and family building plans; A specific focus on raising partners’ awareness about how cancer can affect body image and physical intimacy; and Accessible, evidence-based information about RSH for both partners. These results, along with feedback from stakeholders, informed adaptation and finalization of the intervention content and format. The resulting virtual intervention, Opening the Conversation, includes five weekly sessions offering training to couples in communication and dyadic coping skills for addressing RSH concerns.ConclusionThe systematic adaptation process yielded a theory-informed intervention for young adult couples facing breast and gynecological cancers, which will be evaluated in a randomized controlled trial. The long-term goal is to implement and disseminate Opening the Conversation broadly to reach young adult couples with diverse backgrounds who are experiencing RSH concerns in cancer survivorship. (shrink)

ObjectiveCancer researchers have found midlife couples to have poorer outcomes compared to older couples due to the off-time nature of the illness for them. It is unknown if young couples, who are under-represented in cancer studies and overlooked for supportive programs, are at further risk. This study explored the moderating roles of survivor age and sex on the associations between active engagement and protective buffering and depressive symptoms in couples surviving cancer.MethodsThe exploratory study comprised 49 couples 1–3 years post-diagnosis. Multilevel (...) modeling was used to explore the moderating roles of survivor age and sex, controlling for interdependent data.ResultsApproximately, 37% of survivors and 27% of partners met clinical criteria for further assessment of depression, with 50% of couples having at least one member meeting the criteria. Survivors and their partners did not significantly differ on depressive symptoms, active engagement, or protective buffering. Male survivors reported significantly higher levels of active engagement by their partners than female survivors and female survivors reported significantly higher levels of protective buffering by their partners than male survivors. We found some evidence to suggest that survivor age and sex may play moderating roles between active engagement and protective buffering and depressive symptoms. Older partners and female survivors appeared to experience more positive effects from engaging in positive dyadic behaviors than younger partners and male survivors.ConclusionFindings not only confirm the important role of dyadic behaviors for couples surviving cancer together, but also the important roles of survivor age and sex may play in whether such behaviors are associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms. Future research that examines these complex associations over time and across the adult life span in diverse populations is needed. (shrink)

Food security scholarship and policy tends to embrace the nutrition status of individual men, women and children as the end-goal of food security efforts. While there has been much value in investigating and trying to ensure sufficient nutrition for struggling households around the world, this overriding emphasis on nutrition status has reduced our understandings of what constitutes food adequacy. While token attention has been paid to more qualitative ideas like “cultural appropriateness,” food security scholars and policy makers have been unable (...) to understand the broader value of food, which exceeds its caloric and nutrient counts. Drawing on empirical work from Medellín, Colombia, the paper argues that having adequate food means much more than simply sufficient nutrient intake, perhaps especially among marginalized groups. Exploring the case of food insecure women from Colombia who were forcibly displaced from rural to urban, we demonstrate how understandings of food adequacy must consider the social and environmental imaginaries of marginalized groups. (shrink)

Scientific journals can promote ethical publication practices through policies on conflicts of interest. However, the prevalence of conflict of interest policies and the definition of conflict of interest appear to vary across scientific disciplines. This survey of high-impact, peer-reviewed journals in 12 different scientific disciplines was conducted to assess these variations. The survey identified published conflict of interest policies in 28 of 84 journals (33%). However, when representatives of 49 of the 84 journals (58%) completed a Web-based survey about journal (...) conflict of interest policies, 39 (80%) reported having such a policy. Frequency of policies (including those not published) varied by discipline, from 100% among general medical journals to none among physics journals. Financial interests were most frequently addressed with relation to authors; policies for reviewers most often addressed non-financial conflicts. Twenty-two of the 39 journals with policies (56%) had policies about editors’ conflicts. The highest impact journals in each category were most likely to have a published policy, and the frequency of policies fell linearly with rank; for example, policies were published by 58% of journals ranked 1 in their category, 42% of journals ranked third, and 8% of journals ranked seventh (test for trend, p = 0.003). Having a conflict of interest policy was also associated with a self-reported history of problems with conflict of interest. The prevalence of published conflict of interest policies was higher than that reported in a 1997 study, an increase that might be attributable to heightened awareness of conflict of interest issues. However, many of the journals with policies do not make them readily available and many of those policies that were available lacked clear definitions of conflict of interest or details about how disclosures would be managed during peer review and publication. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent efforts to engage with Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art have focused on its development in the context of Heidegger’s corpus at a key interval in his political ascendancy to, and subsequent decline from, the Rectorship. This article explores the ambiguous role Nietzsche plays in delimiting Heidegger’s engagement with art by tracking the relation between art and truth in two of the four lecture courses Heidegger offered on Nietzsche between 1936 and 1940. Having tracked the shift in (...) this relation, I turn to the 1956 Addendum to Heidegger’s Origin to bring his retrospective reflections on the human to bear on the congruence between his diagnosis of Nietzsche and his own efforts to pose the question of art in terms of the evental happening of truth. (shrink)

In this article I analyze talk in a political setting to demonstrate how disagreement-relevant practices are fitted to context to accomplish a kind of argumentative strategy. I propose that in the British Parliament’s House of Lords, interlocutors deal with dilemmas of disagreement by doing something I refer to as ‘talking around the issue’, a practice involving 1) institutional positioning, 2) display of emotionality, and 3) orientation to the issue. I suggest that these practices are indicative of institutional norms, but also (...) comprise some of the argumentative resources available to interactants in everyday argumentative practice. These practices also reflect key areas of interest in disagreement and conflict research related to context, style, and issues in conflict. (shrink)

This article analyzes discourse, narrative, and video editing to introduce the concept of ‘historical coherence’. This concept is an expansion of Alessandro Duranti’s notion of ‘existential coherence’ – the construction of an embodied narrative connecting a candidate’s past with his or her decision to run for office – from his 2006 study of a candidate’s campaign speeches. This study examines how language and communication are linked with historical narratives through the use of multimodal stories in which US political commercials link (...) candidates’ present actions with historical events, dynamics, artifacts, and/or figures. This ‘historical coherence’ is constructed through the following strategies: constructing a narrative in which popular historical figures or archetypal figures are in agreement with the candidate; preempting charges of lack of historical coherence; and presenting historical restrictions to freedom and casting the candidate, or the candidate’s party, in general, as a preventative from future calamities and transgressions to freedom. (shrink)

This article analyzes gift-exchange occasions as both a sequentially organized activity and as a ritual practice imbued with social and cultural meaning. Specifically, the article focuses on the role of assessments in gifting sequences, the distribution of assessments across participants, and some of the possible troubles which can arise in doing assessments of gifts based on discourse analysis of 44 gifting situations in one family’s 30 home videos spanning 13 years. I argue that participants encounter difficulties in the process of (...) proffering assessments of gifts, and that such troubles revolve around the dilemma of constructing positive assessments as authentically given. The analysis discusses the organization of action in gifting occasions, outlines the expectations and dilemmas involved in doing assessments of gifts, and presents participants’ discursive practices for managing potential troubles in gift assessment. (shrink)

This study represents an existential-phenomenological investigation of the experience of being accepted in individuals who have undergone psychiatric institutionalization. Written protocols of narrative accounts were collected from nine individuals drawn from a partial hospitalization programme, with the analysis of these narratives revealing seven basic constituents of the focal experience. The paper concludes with a discussion of the clinical implications of these findings for understanding this experience as it relates to psychotherapy with individuals who experience severe mental illness symptoms and/or stigma.

This article examines a productive use of communicating gender stereotypes in interpersonal conversation: to resist activities traditionally prescribed according to gender. The analyses video-taped naturally occurring US household interactions and present three techniques participants may deploy to contest gender expectations: mobilizing categories, motivating alignment and reframing action. We show how gender is an accountable category in relation to household labor, and how gender categories provide a resource by which participants can non-seriously solicit and resist participation in domestic gender-prescribed activities. Our (...) analysis provides some insight into how participants use gender stereotypes in everyday talk and what functions such talk serves. (shrink)

Recent empirical work on the concept of intentionality suggests that people’s assessments of whether an action is intentional are subject to uncertainty. Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that different people employ different concepts of intentional action. These possibilities have motivated a good deal of work in the relatively new field of experimental philosophy. The findings from this empirical research may prove to be relevant to medical ethics. In this article, we address this issue head on. We (...) first describe a study we conducted on intention ascription. Drawing on recent work in experimental philosophy, we investigated the possibility that the ascription of intentions to clinical actors in clinical settings is influenced by prior judgments about the goodness or badness of the consequences of the action in question. Our study was modeled on experimental studies in other contexts that have shown that people, when presented with a range of scenarios, are more likely to classify a side effect of an action as intended if the side effect is negative or reflects poorly on the actor than if it is positive or reflects well on the actor. We investigated whether this asymmetry in intention ascriptions was also present among physicians who were asked to ascribe intentions to clinical actors in certain well-defined clinical scenarios. After describing the study and its results, we discuss its implications for medical ethics. (shrink)

In the svārthānumāna chapter of his Pramāṇavārttika, the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti presented a defense of his claim that legitimate inference must rest on a metaphysical basis if it is to be immune from the risks ordinarily involved in inducing general principles from a finite number of observations. Even if one repeatedly observes that x occurs with y and never observes y in the absence of x, there is no guarantee, on the basis of observation alone, that one will never observe (...) y in the absence of x at some point in the future. To provide such a guarantee, claims Dharmakīrti, one must know that there is a causal connection between x and y such that there is no possibility of y occurring in the absence of x. In the course of defending this central claim, Dharmakīrti ponders how one can know that there is a causal relationship of the kind necessary to guarantee a proposition of the form “Every y occurs with an x.” He also dismisses an interpretation of his predecessor Dignāga whereby Dignāga would be claiming non-observation of y in the absence of x is sufficient to warrant to the claim that no y occurs without x. The present article consists of a translation of kārikās 11–38 of Pramānavārttikam, svārthānumānaparicchedaḥ along with Dharmakīrti’s own prose commentary. The translators have also provided an English commentary, which includes a detailed introduction to the central issues in the translated text and their history in the literature before Dharmakīrti. (shrink)

Sunstein advocates a more systematic approach to the study of moral decision-making, namely the heuristics-and-biases paradigm. We offer two concerns and suggest that a focus on decision processes can add value. Recent research on decision modes suggest that it is useful to distinguish between the qualitative differences in the ways in which moral decisions can be made when they are not made by reflective, consequentialist reasoning.

When faced with transgressions in their peer groups, children must navigate a series of situational cues (e.g., type of transgression, transgressor gender, transgressor intentionality) to evaluate the moral status of transgressions and to inform their subsequent behavior toward the transgressors. There is little research on which cues children prioritize when presented together, how reliance on these cues may be affected by certain biases (e.g., gender norms), or how the prioritization of these cues may change with age. To explore these questions, (...) 138 5- to 7-year-olds (younger children) and 8- to 10-year-olds (older children) evaluated a series of boy and girl characters who partook in physical or relational aggression with ambiguous or purposeful intent. Children were asked to provide sociomoral evaluations (i.e., acceptability, punishment, and intention attribution judgments) and social preferences. Transgressor gender only impacted children’s social preferences. Conversely, aggression form and transgressor intent shifted children’s sociomoral judgments: they were harsher toward physical transgressors with purposeful intent over those with ambiguous intent but made similar evaluations for relational transgressors regardless of intentionality. The present results suggest that gender is perhaps not uniformly relevant to children across all contexts, as other cues were prioritized for children’s sociomoral judgments. Since children likely have less familiarity with relational aggression compared to physical aggression, it follows that intent would only shift judgments about physical transgressors. This research provides insight about how children simultaneously navigate multiple cues in aggression contexts, which is likely reflective of their real-world experiences. (shrink)

Unrealistic optimism is a bias that leads people to believe, with respect to a specific event or hazard, that they are more likely to experience positive outcomes and/or less likely to experience negative outcomes than similar others. The phenomenon has been seen in a range of health-related contexts—including when prospective participants are presented with the risks and benefits of participating in a clinical trial. In order to test for the prevalence of unrealistic optimism among participants of early-phase oncology trials, we (...) conducted a survey with patients over 18 years of age who were enrolled in a phase I, phase I/II, or phase II clinical cancer trial in the New York City area between August 2008 and October 2009. Participants in our study were asked to compare their own chances of experiencing a range of risks and benefits related to the trial they were enrolled in with the chances of the other trial participants. We found a significant optimistic bias in their responses. Respondents tended to overestimate the benefits of the trial they were enrolled in and underestimate its risks. In addition, we found no significant relationship between respondents’ understanding of the trial’s purpose and how susceptible they were to unrealistic optimism. Our findings suggest that improving the consent process for oncology studies requires more than addressing deficits in understanding. (shrink)

It is well-established that toddlers can correctly select a novel referent from an ambiguous array in response to a novel label. There is also a growing consensus that robust word learning requires repeated label-object encounters. However, the effect of the context in which a novel object is encountered is less well-understood. We present two embodied neural network replications of recent empirical tasks, which demonstrated that the context in which a target object is encountered is fundamental to referent selection and word (...) learning. Our model offers an explicit account of the bottom-up associative and embodied mechanisms which could support children’s early word learning and emphasises the importance of viewing behaviour as the interaction of learning at multiple timescales. (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on Ingenta Connect.

Clinical trials emerged in rapid succession as the COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented need for life-saving therapies. Fair and equitable subject selection in clinical trials offering investigational therapies ought to be an urgent moral concern. Subject selection determines the distribution of risks and benefits, and impacts the applicability of the study results for the larger population. While Research Ethics Committees monitor fair subject selection within each trial, no standard oversight exists for subject selection across multiple trials for the same disease. (...) Drawing on the experience of multiple clinical trials at a single academic medical centre in the USA, we posit that concurrent COVID-19 trials are liable to unfair and inequitable subject selection on account of scientific uncertainty, lack of transparency, scarcity and, lastly, structural barriers to equity compounded by implicit bias. To address the critical gap in the current literature and international regulation, we propose new ethical guidelines for research design and conduct that bolsters fair and equitable subject selection. Although the proposed guidelines are tailored to the research design and protocol of concurrent trials in the COVID-19 pandemic, they may have broader relevance to single COVID-19 trials. (shrink)

Context The attitudes of medical professionals towards physician assisted dying have been widely discussed. Less explored is the level of agreement among physicians on the possibility of ‘rational suicide’—a considered suicide act made by a sound mind and a precondition of assisted dying legislation. Objective To assess attitudes towards rational suicide in a representative sample of senior doctors in England and Wales. Methods A postal survey was conducted of 1000 consultants and general practitioners randomly selected from a commercially available database. (...) The main outcome of interest was level of agreement with a statement about rational suicide. Results The corrected participation rate was 50%; 363 questionnaires were analysed. Overall 72% of doctors agreed with the possibility of rational suicide, 17% disagreed, and 11% were neutral. Doctors who identified themselves as being more religious were more likely to disagree. Some doctors who disagreed with legalisation of physician assisted suicide nevertheless agreed with the concept of rational suicide. Conclusions Most senior doctors in England and Wales feel that rational suicide is possible. There was no association with specialty. Strong religious belief was associated with disagreement, although levels of agreement were still high in people reporting the strongest religious belief. Most doctors who were opposed to physician assisted suicide believed that rational suicide was possible, suggesting that some medical opposition is best explained by other factors such as concerns of assessment and protection of vulnerable patients. (shrink)

Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with low TPs (LTPs). Such findings could mean that only the HTP sequences have a word‐like status, and they are more readily mapped to a referent for that reason. But these findings could (...) also suggest that HTP sequences are easier to encode, just like any other predictable sequence. Here we aimed to distinguish between these explanations. To do so, we built on findings that infants become resistant to learning labels that are not typical of their native language as they approach 2 years of age and add words to their lexicons. If tracking TPs in speech results in identifying candidate words, at this age TPs may have reduced power to confer lexical status when they yield a unit that is very dissimilar to word forms that are typical of infants’ native language. Indeed, we found that at 20 months, English‐learning infants with relatively small vocabularies learned HTP Italian words (but not LTP words) as object labels, while infants with larger vocabularies resisted learning HTP Italian words. These findings suggest that the HTP sequences may be represented as candidate words, and more broadly, that TP statistics are relevant to word learning. (shrink)