This study aimed at investigating depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms among healthcare workers and examine the role of expressive flexibility and context sensitivity as key components of resilience in understanding reported symptoms. We hypothesized a significant and different contribution of resilience components in explaining depression, anxiety, and stress. A total sample of 218 Italian healthcare workers participated in this study through an online survey during the lockdown, consequently to the COVID-19. The Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 was used to measure depression, (...) anxiety, and stress; the Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression scale was used to measure the ability to enhance and suppress emotional expression; the Context Sensitivity Index was used to measure the ability to accurately perceive contextual cues and determine cue absence. Demographic and work-related data were also collected. DASS-21 cut-off scores were used to verify the mental status among the respondents. Correlational analyses examined relationships between DASS-21, FREE, and CSI, followed by three regression analyses with depression, anxiety, and stress as dependent variables, controlling for age, gender, and work experience. Enhancement and suppression abilities, cue presence, and cue absence served as independent variables. The results showed a prevalence of moderate to extremely severe symptoms of 8% for depression, 9.8% for anxiety, and 8.9% for stress. Results of correlational analysis highlighted that enhance ability was inversely associated with depression and stress. Suppression ability was inversely associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The ability to perceive contextual cues was inversely associated with depression and anxiety. The regression analysis showed that the ability to enhance emotional expression was statistically significant to explain depression among healthcare workers. In predicting anxiety, age, and the ability to accurately perceive contextual cues and determine cue absence made substantial contributions as predictors. In the last regression model, age, work experience, and the ability to suppress emotional expression were significant predictors of stress. This study’s findings can help understand the specific contributions of enhancement and suppression abilities and sensitivity to stressor context cues in predicting depression, anxiety, and stress among healthcare workers. Psychological interventions to prevent burnout should consider these relationships. (shrink)

The association of resilience-related factors with frailty is a recent research topic. Dispositional optimism and context sensitivity are two psychological factors that differently contribute to individual resilience. This study aimed at investigating whether dispositional optimism and context sensitivity might contribute to a multifactorial model of frailty, together with established relevant factors such as cognitive and physical factors. This cross-sectional study involved 141 elderly outpatients aged ≥65 years, who were referred to the Geriatrics and Multidimensional Evaluation Clinic of the University Hospital (...) of Messina. We used the following measures: the Mini-Mental State Examination to screen for global cognitive functioning; 4-m gait speed and handgrip strength to measure physical performance; a 35-item Frailty Index to evaluate patients’ frailty status; the revised Life Orientation Test to gauge dispositional optimism; and the Context Sensitivity Index to measure context sensitivity. We found that LOT-R, CSI, and MMSE were all significantly associated with FI. Gait speed was only marginally associated with FI. The present study showed a novel association of dispositional optimism and context sensitivity with frailty among elderly outpatients. These preliminary findings support a multidimensional approach to frailty in which even peculiar psychological features might provide a significant contribution. (shrink)

This article aims at summing up the reflections of a small group of psychologists who work in the domain of palliative treatment. The theory and methodology supporting it are borrowed by a group analysis approach; the group's purpose is a research based on the workers' experience elaboration, which aims at finding out both the specificities of the work apparatus with the people accompanied to the conclusion of their lives, and the main thematic areas of the relationship between healthcare team, patients, (...) and families. The work we present aims at introducing the most meaningful themes that emerged during group meetings: first of all, some service criticalities examined in the area of terminal healthcare and the workers' possible saturation and psycho-social discomfort quotas, generating in some cases a common sense of professional precariousness. (shrink)

The relationship between traumatic life events and increased suicide risk has been well reported in literature. However, the complex nature of suicidality phenomena still hinders our ability to comprehend the mediation mechanism underlying this association. In this study, we examined the mediating role of adult attachment and reflective functioning in the relationship between traumatic life events and suicidal ideation. Nine hundred and fifty Italian adults completed an online survey evaluating traumatic life events, adult attachment, reflective functioning and suicidal ideation. The (...) path analysis showed that the positive relationship between traumatic life events and suicidal ideation was partially mediated by attachment anxiety and reflective functioning. From a clinical point of view, these results support the relevance of evaluating and improving patients’ ability to mentalize as a part of psychotherapeutic intervention aimed at reducing suicidality in people with a history of traumatic experiences and attachment anxiety. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 outbreak, individuals with or without mental disorders may resort to dysfunctional psychological strategies that could trigger or heighten their emotional distress. The current study aims to explore the links between maladaptive daydreaming, psychological symptoms of depression, anxiety, and negative stress, and COVID-19-related variables, such as changes in face-to-face and online relationships, during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. A total of 6,277 Italian adults completed an online survey, including socio-demographic variables, COVID-19 related information, the 16-item Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale, (...) and Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scales-21 Items. Based on an empirically derived cut-off score, 1,082 participants were identified as probable maladaptive daydreamers. A binary logistic regression revealed that compared to controls, probable MDers reported that during the COVID-19 lockdown they experienced higher levels of anxiety and depression, decreased online social relationships, and, surprisingly, stable or increased face-to-face social relationships. Given the peculiar characteristics of the pandemic context, these findings suggest that the exposure to the risk of contagion had probably exacerbated the tendency of probable MDers to lock themselves inside their mental fantasy worlds, which in turn may have contributed to further estrangement from online social relationships and support, thus worsening their emotional distress. (shrink)

My initial scope will be limited: starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will analyse how actions are possibly represented and understood. The main aim of my arguments will be to show that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action. Action is relational, and the relation holds both between the agent and the object target of the action , as between the agent of (...) the action and his/her observer . Agency constitutes a key issue for the understanding of intersubjectivity and for explaining how individuals can interpret their social world. This account of intersubjectivity, founded on the empirical findings of neuroscientific investigation, will be discussed and put in relation with a classical tenet of phenomenology: empathy. I will provide an 'enlarged' account of empathy that will be defined by means of a new conceptual tool: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey’s premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental evidence suggests that a similar matching system also exists in humans. What might be the functional role of this matching system? One (...) possible function is to enable an organism to detect certain mental states of observed conspecifics. This function might be part of, or a precursor to, a more general mind-reading ability. Two different accounts of mind-reading have been suggested. According to “theory theory‘, mental states are represented as inferred posits of a naive theory. According to “simulation theory‘, other people’s mental states are represented by adopting their perspective: by tracking or matching their states with resonant states of one’s own. The activity of mirror neurons, and the fact that observers undergo motor facilitation in the same muscular groups as those utilized by target agents, are findings that accord well with simulation theory but would not be predicted by theory theory. (shrink)

The aim of our paper is to show that there is a sense of body that is enactive in nature and that enables to capture the most primitive sense of self. We will argue that the body is primarily given to us as source or power for action, i.e., as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which we live, by populating it with things at hand to which we can be directed and with (...) other bodies we can interact with. We will show that this sense of body as bodily self is, on the one hand, antecedent the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and, on the other, it enables and refines such distinction, providing a conceptual framework for the coherent interpretation of a variety of behavioral and neuropsychological data. We will conclude by positing that the basic experiences we entertain of our selves as bodily selves are from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies as they are underpinned by the mirror mechanism. (shrink)

Cet article présente une synthèse du rôle des animaux dans la religion égyptienne en se focalisant tout particulièrement sur le cas des entités hybrides. Alors que l’association avec un ou plusieurs animaux est l’une des caractéristiques des divinités égyptiennes, l’interprétation soulève plusieurs difficultés méthodologiques. Dans la plupart des cas, ces associations sont relativement simples, et mettent en rapport, selon des modalités diverses, un animal avec une divinité ; de telles relations sont alors relativement faciles à identifier et peuvent faire l’objet (...) d’une typologie, en tout cas rudimentaire. Un cas de figure plus complexe est par contre posé par les représentations qui mobilisent non seulement un animal, mais aussi plusieurs motifs iconographiques à la fois. Le présent article commence par identifier les principales formes d’association d’animaux à des divinités, pour ensuite s’interroger plus longuement sur le cas des associations plus complexes, qui sont ici étudiées à partir de deux exemples paradigmatiques : les divinités protectrices et les habitants de la Douat ou monde souterrain. (shrink)

Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts—even concepts about action and perception—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about (...) the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called “abstract” concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns. (shrink)

Discusses the possibility of reconciling different articulations of intentionality from a neurobiological perspective. The author analyzes the relationship between agency and representation and how representation is intrinsically related to action control. The author also presents a new account of action, arguing against what is still commonly held as its proper definition, namely the final outcome of a cascade-like process that starts from the analysis of sensory data, incorporates the result of decision processes, and ends up with responses (actions) to externally-or (...) internally-generated stimuli. The author discusses recent findings from the investigation of neural mechanisms that are at the basis of sensorimotor integration. (shrink)

Background The 2020-2021 coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is just the latest epidemic event that requires us to rethink and change our understanding of health. Health should no longer be conceived only in relation to human beings, but in unitary terms, as a dimension that connects humans, animals, plants, and the environment (holistic view, One Health). In general, alterations occurring in this articulated chain of life trigger a domino effect. Methodology In this paper, we review the One Health paradigm in the light (...) of the Covid-19 pandemic and distinguish two approaches within it that might be dubbed the Prudent one and the Radical one. Each approach is structured in three levels – epistemological, medical, and ethical. Results In this way, we show how we humans can better address the pandemic today and how, in the future, we can treat the whole living system better, by renouncing our anthropocentric perspective on health. Conclusion We hold that the Prudent approach can be very helpful, and we discuss the medical and ethical issues related to it. We also consider the Radical view and the epistemological turn it requires compared to the Prudent one. (shrink)

Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the last years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic (...) social cognition, demonstrating that people e their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others. (shrink)

abstract Much of the literature on torture in recent years takes the position of denouncing the barbarity of torture, while allowing for exceptions to this veto in extreme circumstances. The ticking‐bomb argument, where a terrorist is tortured in order to extract information of a primed bomb located in a civilian area, is often invoked as one of those extreme circumstances where torture becomes justified. As the War on Terrorism intensifies, the ticking‐bomb argument has become the dominant line of reasoning used (...) by both academics and policy advisers to justify a legalized, state‐sponsored program of torture. This paper argues for the unconditional refutation of any attempt to justify torture, without exceptions. We argue against the consequentialist reasoning of the ticking‐bomb argument not from a deontological position, but on consequentialist grounds. Empirical evidence suggests that the institutionalization of torture practices creates serious problems. Torture interrogation fails to fulfil its initial purpose as a low‐cost life saver, while its long‐term potential is the devastation of democratic institutions. (shrink)

Crucial in Girard's Mimetic Theory is the notion of mimetic desire, viewed as appropriative mimicry, the main source of aggressiveness and violence characterizing our species. The intrinsic value of the objects of our desire is not as relevant as the fact that the very same objects are the targets of others' desire. One could in principle object against such apparently negative and one-sided view of mankind, in general, and of mimesis, in particular. However, such argument would misrepresent Girard's thought. Girard (...) himself acknowledged that mimetic desire is also good in itself, because is at the basis of love, and even more importantly because it's the opening out of oneself. Starting from the notion of desire as openness to others I will discuss from a neuroscientific perspective the implications for social cognition of mimesis against the background of Girard's Mimetic Theory, an ideal starting framework to foster a multidisciplinary approach to the study of human intersubjectivity. It will be posited that a different, not mutually exclusive, account of mimesis leads to social identification henceforth to sociality. Mimesis is neither good or bad, but has the potentials to lead not only to mimetic violence but also to the most creative aspects of human cognition. Results of empirical research in neuroscience and developmental psychology show that such account of mimesis finds solid supporting evidence. It will be concluded that a thorough and biologically plausible account of human intersubjectivity requires the integration of both sides of mimesis. (shrink)

The representational dynamics of the brain is a subsymbolic process, and it has to be conceived as an "agent-free" type of dynamical self-organization. However, in generating a coherent internal world-model, the brain decomposes target space in a certain way. In doing so, it defines an "ontology": to have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting the world, possesses an ontology too. It decomposes target space (...) in a way that exhibits certain invariances, which in turn are functionally significant. A challenge for empirical research is to determine which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process. What are the explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of the brain's motor output and the representational deep structure of the conscious mind arising from it (its "phenomenal output")? How do they constrain high-level phenomena like conscious experience, the emergence of a first-person perspective, or social cognition? By reviewing a series of neuroscientific results, we focus on the contribution the motor system makes to this process. As it turns out, the motor system constructs goals, actions, and intending selves as basic constituents of the world it interprets. It does so by assigning a single, unified causal role to them. Empirical evidence now clearly shows how the brain actually codes movements and action goals in terms of multimodal representations of organism-object relations. Under a representationalist analysis, this process can be interpreted as an internal representation of the intentionality relation itself. We try to show how such a more complex form of representational content, once it is in place, can later function as the building block for social cognition and a for more complex, consciously experienced representation of the first-person perspective as well. The motor system may therefore play a decisive role in understanding how the functional ontology of the human brain could be gradually extended into the subjective and social domains. (shrink)

In this article we provide a unifying neural hypothesis on how individuals understand the actions and emotions of others. Our main claim is that the fundamental mechanism at the basis of the experiential understanding of others' actions is the activation of the mirror neuron system. A similar mechanism, but involving the activation of viscero-motor centers, underlies the experiential understanding of the emotions of others.

Dieses Buch bietet die umfassende neuere Darstellung und Analyse des ganzen Hegelschen Systems. Dabei wird Hegels Philosophie in einer klaren und leichtverständlichen Sprache einer immanenten Kritik unterzogen, die sich weder in Paraphrasen erschöpft noch mit der Versicherung entgegengesetzter Behauptung ihr Ende findet. "Ein wirklich faszinierendes Werk, das das systematische Philosophieren selbst erneut zu wecken vermag" Philosophisches Jahrbuch.

For more than a century after its appearance on the modern philosophical scene, Spinoza’s philosophy was considered surprising and even scandalous for its assertion of the oneness or singularity of substance. From Bayle’s early Dictionary article to Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the core of Spinoza’s philosophy was said to be its unprecedented gesture of making God the sole res that could be thought through the concept of substance. Substance, according to definition 3 of part I of the (...) Ethics, is “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.” The enormous emphasis placed on this move by the interpretative tradition almost into the twentieth century managed, however, to obscure every other dimension of Spinoza’s thought, so that Spinoza’s thought was simply a metaphysics of the oneness of substance. It is this coupling of Spinozism and the metaphysics of substance that I want to undo. In line with a series of interpretative developments in France over the last thirty years, I want to dispel this identification by employing a paradoxical formulation. Far from being a metaphysics of substance, I contend that Spinoza’s philosophy is instead an ontology of relation. By emphasizing his negation of the substantiality of what he calls res singulares, we can locate Spinoza’s originality less in having posited the existence of a single substance—Letter 50 in fact suggests that substance can only “improperly” be called “single” or “one”—than in having laid out the foundation for this ontology of relation. (shrink)

This commentary questions Elqayam & Evans' (E&E's) claims that thinking tasks are doomed to have multiple normative readings and that only applied research allows normative evaluations. In fact, some tasks have just one undisputed normative reading, and not only pathological gamblers but also normal individuals sometimes need normative guidance. To conclude, normative evaluations are inevitable in the investigation of human thinking.

The aim of the paper is that of putting intoquestion the dichotomy between fact-judgments andvalue judgments in the legal domain, with its epistemologicalpresuppositions (descriptivist image of knowledge) andits methodological implications for legal knowledge (valuefreedom principle and neutrality thesis). The basicquestion that I will try to answer is whether and on whatconditions strong ethical value-judgments belong withinlegal knowledge.I criticize the traditional positivist positionsthat have fully accepted the value-freedom principle andvalue-neutrality thesis, but I also submit to critical scrutinythe new post-positivist views, that, (...) even if they showinteresting conceptual developments on the matter, end up,nevertheless, by presupposing the same epistemologicalimage, while I call descriptivism. I stress that only by giving updescriptivism and accepting constructivism as a generalimage of knowledge is it possible to see the problem ofvalue-ladenness of legal knowledge in a new light.On the basis of the constructivist image, I present two theses:firstly, at a much broader epistemological level, I advance theminimalist thesis on value-judgments, which simply removes thegeneral ban on treating values as present withinknowledge; secondly, I advance the strong thesis on legalvalue-judgments, which consists in arguing for thenecessary presence of ethical value-judgments in legal knowledge.I draw, in the end, some important implications from acceptanceof the strong thesis. One of these implications isa new distinction that replaces the traditional distinctionbetween fact-judgments and value judgments, namely, thedistinction between value-judgments exhibiting a cognitivefunction and value-judgments exhibiting a creativefunction. (shrink)

Summary Embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism of our brain, and its neural underpinnings are discussed and connected to intersubjectivity and the reception of human cultural artefacts, like visual arts and film. Embodied simulation provides a unified account of both non-verbal and verbal aspects of interpersonal relations that likely play an important role in shaping not only the self and his/her relation to others, but also shared cultural practices. Embodied simulation sheds new light on aesthetic experience and is proposed as (...) a key element for the dialogue between neuroscience and the humanities within the biocultural paradigm. (shrink)

The Marxian Thesis about the role of violence in History, as it is enunciated in The Capital, is investigated through an analysis of the Hegelian character of its syntax, and the way Engels develops it; a non-teleological interpretation of the thesis is then defended, one that understands that violence presents a plurality of forms, a pervasive character and a heavy materiality.Trata-se de investigar a tese marxiana acerca do papel da violência na história, tal como enunciada em O Capital, analisando sua (...) sintaxe de matriz hegeliana e o modo como Engels articula tal tese, para então defender uma interpretação não-teleológica da violência, segundo a qual esta apresenta uma pluralidade de formas, um caráter totalmente difuso e uma pesada materialidade. (shrink)

Taking as our starting point Plato'smetaphor of the doctor as philosopher we reflect on some aspects of the epistemological status of medicine. The framework to this paper is the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer which shows the paradoxical nature of Western medicine in choosing the body-object as its investigative starting point, while in actual fact dealing with subjects. Gadamer proposes a model of medicine as the art of understanding and dialogue, which is capable of bringing together its various constituent parts, i.e. (...) knowledge, knowing how to do and knowing how to be, in medical practice and in the physician'straining. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the dyadic figure of the physician as Platonic “master of the living totality” and wounded healer, capable of activating the patient'sself-healing capacity. (shrink)

According to Kanazawa (Psychol Rev 111:512–523, 2004), general intelligence, which he considers as a synonym of abstract thinking, evolved specifically to allow our ancestors to deal with evolutionary novel problems while conferring no advantage in solving evolutionary familiar ones. We present a study whereby the results contradict Kanazawa’s hypothesis by demonstrating that performance on an evolutionary novel problem (an abstract reasoning task) predicts performance on an evolutionary familiar problem (a social reasoning task).

This article rejects the received view that Post-Truth is a new, unprecedented political phenomenon. By showing that Truth and Post-Truth share the same genesis, this article will submit the idea of a Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 1 looks at the difference between Post-Truth, lies and bullshit. Part 2 suggests reasons behind the current preoccupation with Post-Truth. Part 3 focuses on Habermas’s influential consensus theory of truth to suggest that truth and Post-Truth have more in common than is generally assumed. (...) Part 4 puts forward the Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 5 suggests three ways to emasculate the potentially destructive effect of Post-Truth on democratic society. (shrink)