Lisa Kemmerer | : This article explores whether or not animal activists who engage in violence might legitimately be labelled “terrorists.” To this end, I examine common assumptions concerning the use of pre-emptive counter-violence in order to defend the comparatively defenceless. Through the use of casuistry, this essay compares specific hypothetical instances of killing comparatively defenceless individuals, beginning with scenarios that offer a clear general consensus, moving to more controversial cases. This indicates that contemporary violence on behalf of animal (...) liberation, often assumed to be rash and radical, is actually quite restrained. The intent of this paper is not to make claims as to how liberationists ought to behave, but rather to highlight egregious inconsistencies in our attitudes toward violence on behalf of those who are comparatively defenceless. | : Cet article vise à déterminer si les activistes animaliers qui se livrent à des actes violents doivent légitimement ou non être taxés de « terroristes ». À cette fin, j’examine les idées courantes relatives à l’utilisation de la violence préventive dans le but de défendre des êtres qui sont relativement sans défense. À l’aide de la casuistique, cet essai compare des exemples hypothétiques spécifiques de meurtres d’individus relativement sans défense, en commençant avec des scénarios qui offrent un consensus général clair, pour passer ensuite à des cas plus controversés. Cette recherche montre que la violence contemporaine perpétrée au nom de la libération des animaux, que l’on considère souvent comme étant téméraire et radicale, est en fait assez retenue. L’objectif de cet article ne consiste pas à prendre position au sujet de la façon dont les libérationnistes devraient se comporter, mais plutôt à mettre en évidence les incohérences flagrantes de nos attitudes face à la violence perpétrée au nom des êtres qui sont relativement sans défense. (shrink)

Animal Cognition: The Mental Lives of Animals, by Clive Wynne, provides a brief exploration of important concepts, methods, and fields of study in the area of animal cognition. Wynne includes information on the history of research into animal minds, and a wide range of data collected from a host of experiments. Animal Cognition encourages those interested to join in the much-needed study of animal behavior, and offers a plethora of graphs, illustrations, and photographs to aid readers.

I explore some of the ways that assumptions about the nature of substance shape metaphysical debates about the structure of Reality. Assumptions about the priority of substance play a role in an argument for monism, are embedded in certain pluralist metaphysical treatments of laws of nature, and are central to discussions of substantivalism and relationalism. I will then argue that we should reject such assumptions and collapse the categorical distinction between substance and property.

The sports world has historically rejected the practice of tanking. I argue that this attitude is unwarranted. To do so, I introduce a concept called strategic suboptimal play (SSP), which is the practice of incurring the risk of a short-term competitive disadvantage to increase the chances of gaining a longer-term competitive advantage. Tanking is just an instance of SSP employed in higher-order games, i.e. games that are at least partially played by other games, like tournaments or seasons. Since SSP is (...) integral to every sport, there are currently no easy grounds for rejecting it outright. As such, the same is true of tanking. I will explore some possible reasons why tanking is wrongly thought objectionable, as well as some objections to and implications of my argument for competitive sports more broadly. (shrink)

It is in the scholium of thePrincipiaon time, space, place and motion that Newton delivers what is — arguably — a reluctant kiss of betrayal to empiricism. Right there, ‘in the main body of his chief work,’ as E.A. Burtt observes, the deed is done: ‘When we come to Newton's remarks on space and time … he takes personal leave of his empiricism.’ Reichenbach registers the event less charitably, dismissing the ‘crude reification of space that Newton shares with the epistemologically (...) unschooled mind in its naive craving for realism.’ Injury is then added to insult as Reichenbach holds Newtonian mechanics to task for arresting the analysis of the problems of space and time for more than two centuries. (shrink)

This essay examines the question: what does the maker mind make, and what is it anyway? It argues that active thinking, thinking as theoria, which the maker mind makes, is a thinking most fully exemplified in the unremittingly active thinking of the divine mind. Thus, the maker mind is not simply an element in Aristotle’s psychological theory, but also an element in this theology.

BackgroundThe emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine has prompted the development of numerous ethical guidelines, while the involvement of patients in the creation of these documents lags behind. As part of the European PROFID project we explore patient perspectives on the ethical implications of AI in care for patients at increased risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD).AimExplore perspectives of patients on the ethical use of AI, particularly in clinical decision-making regarding the implantation of an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD).MethodsSemi-structured, future scenario-based (...) interviews were conducted among patients who had either an ICD and/or a heart condition with increased risk of SCD in Germany (n = 9) and the Netherlands (n = 15). We used the principles of the European Commission’s Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI to structure the interviews.ResultsSix themes arose from the interviews: the ability of AI to rectify human doctors’ limitations; the objectivity of data; whether AI can serve as second opinion; AI explainability and patient trust; the importance of the ‘human touch’; and the personalization of care. Overall, our results reveal a strong desire among patients for more personalized and patient-centered care in the context of ICD implantation. Participants in our study express significant concerns about the further loss of the ‘human touch’ in healthcare when AI is introduced in clinical settings. They believe that this aspect of care is currently inadequately recognized in clinical practice. Participants attribute to doctors the responsibility of evaluating AI recommendations for clinical relevance and aligning them with patients’ individual contexts and values, in consultation with the patient.ConclusionThe ‘human touch’ patients exclusively ascribe to human medical practitioners extends beyond sympathy and kindness, and has clinical relevance in medical decision-making. Because this cannot be replaced by AI, we suggest that normative research into the ‘right to a human doctor’ is needed. Furthermore, policies on patient-centered AI integration in clinical practice should encompass the ethics of everyday practice rather than only principle-based ethics. We suggest that an empirical ethics approach grounded in ethnographic research is exceptionally well-suited to pave the way forward. (shrink)

Recent scholarship emphasizes the scaffolding role of language for cognition. Language, it is claimed, is a cognition-enhancing niche (Clark, 2006), a programming tool for cognition (Lupyan and Bergen, 2016), even a neuroenhancement (Dove, 2019), and augments cognitive functions such as memory, categorization, cognitive control as well as meta-cognitive abilities (‘thinking about thinking’). Yet the notion that language enhances or augments cognition does not fit in with embodied approaches to language processing, or so we will argue. Accounts aiming to explain how (...) language enhances various cognitive functions often employ a notion of abstract representation. Yet embodied approaches to language processing have it that language processing crucially, according to some accounts even exclusively, involves embodied, modality-specific, i.e. non-abstract representations. In coming to understand a particular phrase or sentence, a prior experience has to be simulated or reenacted. The representation thus activated is embodied (modality-specific) as sensorimotor regions of the brain are thereby recruited. In the paper, we will first discuss the notion of representation, clarify what it takes for a representation to be embodied or abstract respectively, and distinguish between conceptual and (other) linguistic representations. We will then put forward a characterization of cognitive control and examine its representational infrastructure. The remainder of the paper will be devoted to arguing that language augments cognitive control. To that end, we will draw on two lines of research, which investigate how language augments cognitive control: i. research on the availability of linguistic labels, and ii. research on the active usage of a linguistic code, specifically in inner speech. Eventually, we will argue that the cognition-enhancing capacity of language can be explained once we assume that it provides us with a. abstract, non-embodied representations, and with b. abstract, sparse linguistic representations that may serve as easy-to-manipulate placeholders for fully embodied or otherwise more detailed representations. (shrink)

Prior research has examined value antecedents to sustainable consumption, including religious or cultural values. We bridge together these usually separated bodies of literature to provide an ethically-based examination of both religious and cultural values in one model to understand what drives sustainable consumption as well as outcomes on consumer well-being. In doing so, we also fulfill calls for more research on socio-demographic antecedents to ethical consumption, particularly in the domain of sustainable consumption. We examine this relationship using data from the (...) religiously and culturally diverse country of Singapore, collected from a door-to-door, representative sample utilizing numerous quality control techniques. Our path analysis and logical follow-up tests reveal that both religious and cultural values influence sustainable consumption, and then sustainable consumption positively influences consumer well-being. Implications are provided for consumer ethics, business’ ethical practices, and belief congruence theory. (shrink)

The term fuzzy logic is used in this paper to describe an imprecise logical system, FL, in which the truth-values are fuzzy subsets of the unit interval with linguistic labels such as true, false, not true, very true, quite true, not very true and not very false, etc. The truth-value set, , of FL is assumed to be generated by a context-free grammar, with a semantic rule providing a means of computing the meaning of each linguistic truth-value in as a (...) fuzzy subset of [0, 1].Since is not closed under the operations of negation, conjunction, disjunction and implication, the result of an operation on truth-values in requires, in general, a linguistic approximation by a truth-value in . As a consequence, the truth tables and the rules of inference in fuzzy logic are (i) inexact and (ii) dependent on the meaning associated with the primary truth-value true as well as the modifiers very, quite, more or less, etc. (shrink)

AFTER ARGUING THAT LAUDAN’S ACCOUNT OF THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THEORY APPRAISAL IS INADEQUATE AND UNSATISFYING IN A NUMBER OF RESPECTS, I SUGGEST SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH WE MIGHT MOVE TO DEVELOP AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT. THIS ALTERNATIVE PRESUPPOSES A PROBLEM-SOLVING METHODOLOGY AND, UNLIKE THE LAUDANIAN APPROACH, AWARDS A CRUCIAL ROLE TO EMPIRICAL RESEARCH IN THE RESOLUTION OF THE CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS TROUBLING A THEORY. THREE WAYS IN WHICH A THEORY MAY ENHANCE THE CONCEPTUAL RESOURCES WHICH IT SUPPLIES (...) FOR EMPIRICAL PROBLEM SOLVING ARE CONSIDERED: THE FINE-TUNING OF THEORETICAL CONCEPTS; THE APPROPRIATION OF THE CONCEPTUAL RESOURCES OF THEORIES IN OTHER DOMAINS; AND THE ACHIEVEMENT OF GREATER CONSILIENCE. REFERENCE IS MADE TO SEVERAL HISTORICAL CASES IN WHICH SUCH ENHANCEMENT ACTUALLY OCCURRED. (shrink)

L.A. Paul calls “deep” the kind of essentialism according to which the essential properties of objects are determined independently of the context. Deep essentialism opposes “shallow essentialism”, of which David Lewis is said to be a prominent advocate. Paul argues that standard forms of deep essentialism face a range of issues (mainly based on an interpretation of Quinean skepticism) that shallow essentialism does not. However, Paul claims, shallow essentialism eliminates the very heart of what motivates essentialism, so it is better (...) to be deep than shallow. Accordingly, she proposes a very sharp novel account of essentialism, which, while attempting to preserve some of the advantages of shallow essentialism over the classical forms of deep essentialism, can be deemed to be deep. In this paper, I compare Paul’s proposal for a kind of deep essentialism with Lewis’s account, as it is presented by Paul. My aim is to show that the differences between the two approaches are not as significant as Paul takes them to be, and that Paul’s account can be taken to be deeper than Lewis’s only at the cost of sacrificing the very idea at the bottom of deep essentialism. This might be taken to suggest that, if Paul is correct in asserting that shallow essentialism is better equipped to address some skeptical challenges, but it is generally preferable to be deep than shallow, then Lewis’s account should be re-evaluated, since, as shallow as it can be, it might be deeper than it looks. (shrink)

Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Neither common sense nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation, or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Causation: A User's Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing but vital landscape. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of examples (...) as landmarks. They clarify the central themes of the debate about causation, and cover questions about causation involving omissions or absences, preemption and other species of redundant causation, and the possibility that causation is not transitive. Along the way, Paul and Hall examine several contemporary proposals for analyzing the nature of causation and assess their merits and overall methodological cogency.The book is designed to be of value both to trained specialists and those coming to the problem of causation for the first time. It provides the reader with a broad and sophisticated view of the metaphysics of the causal relation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Researchers have increasingly acknowledged that affect plays a role in ethical decision making. However, the impact that specific affective states may have on the expression of decision biases in the context of ethical dilemmas has received limited empirical attention. To address this, the present effort examined the impact of happy and sad affective states on biases in ethical decision making. In an online experiment, undergraduate students read short stories that either induced happy, sad, or relaxed affective states, followed by (...) a covert measure of three types of biases held to inhibit ethical decision making. Results demonstrated that happy affective states increased the expression of regulation biases, and sad affective states increased the expression of simplification biases, compared to relaxed affective states. Implications are discussed for advancing research on ethical decision making and reducing unethical behavior in organizations. (shrink)

We demonstrate that the key components of cognitive architectures (declarative and procedural memory) and their key capabilities (learning, memory retrieval, probability judgment, and utility estimation) can be implemented as algebraic operations on vectors and tensors in a high‐dimensional space using a distributional semantics model. High‐dimensional vector spaces underlie the success of modern machine learning techniques based on deep learning. However, while neural networks have an impressive ability to process data to find patterns, they do not typically model high‐level cognition, and (...) it is often unclear how they work. Symbolic cognitive architectures can capture the complexities of high‐level cognition and provide human‐readable, explainable models, but scale poorly to naturalistic, non‐symbolic, or big data. Vector‐symbolic architectures, where symbols are represented as vectors, bridge the gap between the two approaches. We posit that cognitive architectures, if implemented in a vector‐space model, represent a useful, explanatory model of the internal representations of otherwise opaque neural architectures. Our proposed model, Holographic Declarative Memory (HDM), is a vector‐space model based on distributional semantics. HDM accounts for primacy and recency effects in free recall, the fan effect in recognition, probability judgments, and human performance on an iterated decision task. HDM provides a flexible, scalable alternative to symbolic cognitive architectures at a level of description that bridges symbolic, quantum, and neural models of cognition. (shrink)

The role of evolutionary theory at the origin of life is an extensively debated topic. The origin and early development of life is usually separated into a prebiotic phase and a protocellular phase, ultimately leading to the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Most likely, the Last Universal Common Ancestor was subject to Darwinian evolution, but the question remains to what extent Darwinian evolution applies to the prebiotic and protocellular phases. In this review, we reflect on the current status of evolutionary theory (...) in origins of life research by bringing together philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, and empirical research in the origins field. We explore the various ways in which evolutionary theory has been extended beyond biology; we look at how these extensions apply to the prebiotic development of (proto)metabolism; and we investigate how the terminology from evolutionary theory is currently being employed in state-of-the-art origins of life research. In doing so, we identify some of the current obstacles to an evolutionary account of the origins of life, as well as open up new avenues of research. (shrink)

Our paper contributes to the rapidly expanding body of experimental research on transformative decision making, and in the process, marks out a novel empirical interpretation for assessments of subjective value in transformative contexts. We start with a discussion of the role of subjective value in transformative decisions, and then critique extant experimental work that explores this role, with special attention to Reuter and Messerli (2018). We argue that current empirical treatments miss a crucial feature of practical deliberation manifesting across a (...) variety of everyday decisions: often, people attach more weight to decision criteria that they can know—a phenomenon known as the “evaluability bias.” In transformative contexts, if people cannot know the subjective value of an option, they are unlikely to attach it much weight. Despite this, people may care very much about such value. We then use this point to develop and present new empirical results that, in addition to supporting our concerns about evaluability bias, support the hypothesis that people care about subjective value. Our work enriches the current philosophical understanding of transformative decisions and helps to frame the emerging experimental paradigm for the empirical dimensions of the debate. (shrink)

Social scientific reasoning (SSR) is essential to social science education and to a democratic society as a whole. Students are challenged to analyze and reason about social problems such as social inequality, crime, and poverty. However, students experience difficulties with SSR. This study addresses the research question: Which design principles can guide teachers in designing lessons that promote social scientific reasoning? In this design-based research, four social science teachers employed a conceptualization of SSR and its levels together with three initial (...) design principles to develop curriculum materials and activities. These design principles and curriculum materials were piloted in two secondary education classes (9th and 10th grades) and evaluated by four social science teachers, four social science teacher educators and 90 students. The study produced six design principles that can promote students’ SSR. In combination with the curriculum materials, those design principles can help develop teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and guide the design of tasks and units that develop SSR. (shrink)

While the 2022 Supreme Court of the United States decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization may bring the contingent rights of pregnant people to refuse interventions into sharper foc...

The negative emotions generated following stressful life events can increase one’s risk of depressive symptoms and promote higher levels of perceived stress. The process model of emotion regulation can help distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies to determine who may be at the greatest risk of worse psychological health across the lifespan. Heart rate variability may affect these relationships as it indexes aspects of self-regulation, including emotion and behavioral regulation, that enable an individual to dynamically adapt to the (...) changing demands of both internal and external environments. In this study, we expected individual differences in resting vagally mediated HRV to moderate the influence of emotion regulatory strategies among our sample of 267 adults. We found support for the hypothesis that higher vagally mediated HRV buffers against the typical adverse effects of expressive suppression when evaluating depressive symptoms and found weak support when considering perceived stress. There was no evidence for an interaction between cognitive reappraisal and vagally mediated HRV but there was a significant, negative association between cognitive reappraisal and depressive symptoms and perceived stress. Future work may determine if intervening on either emotion regulation strategies or HRV may change these within-persons over time. (shrink)

Theoretical perspectives on non-suicidal self-injury have long underscored the affective regulating properties of NSSI. Less attention has been given to the processes through which individuals choose to engage in NSSI, specifically, to regulate their distress. In the present study, we tested one theoretical model in which recent stressful experiences facilitates NSSI through emotional reactivity. Further, we tested whether the indirect link between stressful experiences and NSSI was moderated by several NSSI specific risk factors. Given the widespread prevalence of NSSI among (...) community-based samples of adolescents and emerging adults, we surveyed 1,125 emerging adults in first-year university at a large academic institution. Participants completed an online survey three times, reporting on their recent stressful experiences in university, emotional reactivity, NSSI, as well as three NSSI specific risk factors. As expected, path analysis revealed that there was a significant indirect effect of recent stressful experiences on NSSI engagement, through emotional reactivity. However, this effect was maintained across moderator analyses. These novel findings underscore the salient role of proximally occurring stressors in the prediction of NSSI among emerging adults in university, and can inform developing theoretical perspectives on NSSI. (shrink)

Human suffering is a complex phenomenon that can manifest physically or psychologically. As the negative valence of affective phenomena, with the positive being pleasure or happiness, human suffering could easily be interpreted as something to avoid. Sartre explored existential aspects of human suffering in Being and Nothingness. Examining each occurrence of the word suffering in that work provides a basis for understanding the roles Sartre assigned to it within the human experience and consequently provides a more nuanced appreciation of this (...) complex phenomenon. An electronic copy of Being and Nothingness was searched for all occurrences of the word suffering (N = 50), tabularized using the Key Word In Context (KWIC) approach at the sentence level, resulting in 40 sentences for thematic analysis. That analysis resulted in 5 themes, showing the complexity of suffering in Sartre’s major philosophical work and suggesting that suffering is quintessentially human, unavoidable, and potentially liberating. (shrink)

En este trabajo se ofrece un bosquejo biográfico de H. L. A. Hart así como una reconstrucción del contexto cultural y filosófico en el que forjó su pensamiento. En la primera parte se proporcionan los datos más relevantes de su biografía, entre los que destaca su participación en los servicios de inteligencia durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Posteriormente, el trabajo incursiona en el panorama filosófico británico de principios del siglo XX, durante la llamada revuelta anti-idealista, que es donde se ubican (...) los orígenes de la moderna filosofía analítica. Es allí donde encontramos los antecedentes del método filosófico de Hart; concretamente, en la corriente de la filosofía del lenguaje ordinario encabezada por J. L. Austin. El autor concluye con una serie de testimonios del propio Hart donde se evidencia lo anterior y plantea algunos temas para futuras investigaciones. (shrink)

Prof. Alberto Urquidez, in an important recent article that appears in different form in his book, Redefining Racism, offers an informed, sustained, careful, multi-pronged, and sometimes original critique of the volitional analysis of racism, which I have proposed in a series of articles over the past two dozen years. Here I expand and improve VAR’s analysis of paternalistic racists and their beliefs, clarify its ‘infection’-model’s explanation of racism’s spread and variety, and lay out what it is for something to be (...) ‘characteristically’ racist, an understanding that I then use to offer a unified account of the way in which both certain physical objects and certain abstract objects can properly be called racist. Identifying and engaging some presuppositions behind Urquidez’s social, political, and moral criticisms of VAR, I respond to complaints from him and others, showing that VAR’s content is neither politically conservative nor dependent on religious doctrine, and point out that race theory would in fact profit from taking more seriously and internalizing the Christian morality of most African-Americans. (shrink)

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, frontline workers faced a series of challenges balancing family and work responsibilities. These challenges included making decisions about how to reduce COVID-19 exposure to their families while still carrying out their employment duties and caring for their children. We sought to understand how frontline workers made these decisions and how these decisions impacted their experiences.Methods: Between October 2020 and May 2021, we conducted 61 semi-structured interviews in English or Spanish, with individuals who continued to work (...) outside of the home during the pandemic and had children living at home. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using abductive methods.Results: Frontline workers experienced moral distress, the inability to act in accordance with their values and obligations because of internal or external constraints. Their moral distress was a result of the tensions they felt as workers and parents, which sometimes led them to feel like they had to compromise on either or both responsibilities. Individuals felt morally conflicted because 1) their COVID-19 work exposures presented risk that often jeopardized their family’s health; 2) their work hours often conflicted with their increased childcare responsibilities; and 3) they felt a duty to their colleagues, patients/customers, and communities to continue to show-up to work.Conclusions: Our findings point to a need to expand the concept of moral distress to include the perspectives of frontline workers outside of the healthcare professions and the fraught decisions that workers make outside of work that may impact their moral distress. Expanding the concept of moral distress also allows for a justice-based framing that can focus attention on the disparities inherent in much frontline work and can justify programmatic recommendations, like increasing paid childcare opportunities, to alleviate moral distress. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the processes by which entrepreneurial opportunities are cocreated between entrepreneurs and their stakeholders. The longitudinal case study of de novo firm Wakefield Seafoods seeks to understand the underlying dynamics of phenomena that play out over time as stakeholders emerge and their contributions become essential to the opportunity formation process. The king crab data show that under conditions of uncertainty, characterized by incomplete or missing knowledge, entrepreneurial processes of experimentation, failure, and learning were effective in forming (...) and exploiting an opportunity. Moreover, contrary to existing literature that either emphasizes heroic entrepreneurs or downplays their value, this article shows that both the vision of the entrepreneur and the stakeholder contributions are critical. This detailed examination of process data shows that the cumulative actions made by entrepreneurs in concert with their stakeholders formed an opportunity that coalesced into a new market. (shrink)

Background Duty to care is integral to nursing practice. Personal obligations that normally conflict with professional obligations are likely amplified during a public health emergency such as COVID-19. Organizations can facilitate a nurse’s ability to fulfill the duty to care without compromising on personal obligations. Research Aim The study aimed to explore the relationships among duty to care, perception of supportive environment, perceived stress, and COVID-19-specific anxieties in nurses working directly with COVID-19 patients. Research Design The study design was a (...) cross-sectional descriptive study using an online survey. It was conducted at an ANCC Magnet® designated 385-bed acute care teaching hospital located in a suburban area. Participants and Research Context Included in this study were 339 medical surgical nurses working directly with COVID-19 patients during the early phase of the pandemic. Ethical Considerations The study was reviewed by the institution’s clinical research committee and determined to be exempt. A survey invitation letter with a voluntary implied consent agreement was sent to participants with a description of the research study attached to the anonymous survey. Results Nurses with specific COVID-19-related anxieties were more likely to agree that it was ethical to abandon the workplace during a pandemic. Conclusions Organizations can and ought to mitigate the negative effects of COVID-19 on duty to care in future pandemics and healthcare emergencies by incorporating several recommendations derived from this study. (shrink)

Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11–18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (...) (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts. Results indicated that participants performed more poorly in negative contexts and showed age-related performance improvements. Those at risk of depression performed more poorly than those at lower risk. However, there was no difference between groups as a result of affective context. For anxiety there was no difference in performance as a function of severity. However, those with higher anxiety showed less variance in their reaction times to negative stimuli than those with lower anxiety. One interpretation is that moderate levels of emotional arousal associated with anxiety make individuals less susceptible to the distracting effects of negative stimuli. (shrink)