People living in areas of intractable conflicts experience extreme negative emotions which ultimately lead to support of aggressive policies. Emotion regulation and particularly cognitive reapprais...

Patients with advanced dementia are less likely than those with other terminal illnesses to receive palliative care. Due to the nature and course of dementia, there may be a failure to recognize the terminal stage of the disease. A possible and under-investigated explanation for this healthcare disparity is the healthcare practitioner who plays a primary role in end-of-life decision-making. Two potential areas that might impact provider decision-making are cognitive biases and moral considerations. In this analysis, we demonstrate how the cognitive (...) biases and moral considerations of practitioners related to clinical decision-making are inherent in clinical practice and may impact on providers’ accuracy related to diagnostic and treatment related decision-making associated with patients with advanced dementia. Anchoring, default, availability, representativeness and framing biases are cognitive biases based on the "Two System Model" that relate to decision-making in end-of-life care. In patients with advanced dementia, those biases may result in a tendency to adhere to traditional mandatory care, involving an aggressive approach to care, which values saving lives at all costs, without taking into account the possible suffering and long-term consequences. Aspects such as moral sensitivity and moral courage play an important role in ethical decision-making related to advanced dementia. Investigations of clinical decision-making that include the cognitive biases and ethical considerations of practitioners might advance the comprehensive understanding of the clinical decision-making process related to care of patients with advanced dementia and promote the quality of care given to this population. (shrink)

This article opens new perspectives for the study of gender, transnationalism and cultural capital by exploring the role of gender in the formation of cultural capital in transnational contexts, focusing on how migrant mothers’ strategically deploy cultural resources from one national setting in another. Drawing on a study of middle-class European mothers in London, it shows how they mobilize transnational cultural resources to compensate for shortcomings of economic, national and local cultural capital, as well as accruing added value to their (...) children’s education. Indeed, some mothers engage in transnational cultural currency speculation of cultural resources by converting the educational investment in their children into educational credentials in the national setting where they expect the highest returns. Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital and field help explore the relationship between national and transnational cultural capital in the European middle-class migrants’ emergent mobility practices. (shrink)

The impact of stroke on motor functioning is analyzed at different levels. ‘Impairment’ denotes the loss of basic characteristics of voluntary movement. ‘Activity limitation’ denotes the loss of normal capacity for independent execution of daily activities. Recovery from impairment is accomplished by ‘restitution’ and recovery from activity limitation is accomplished by the combined effect of ‘restitution’ and ‘compensation.’ We aimed to unravel the long-term effects of variation in lesion topography on motor impairment of the hemiparetic lower limb (HLL), and gait (...) capacity as a measure of related activity limitation. Gait was assessed by the 3 m walk test (3MWT) in 67 first-event chronic stroke patients, at their homes. Enduring impairment of the HLL was assessed by the Fugl–Meyer Lower Extremity (FMA-LE) test. The impact of variation in lesion topography on HLL impairment and on walking was analyzed separately for left and right hemispheric damage (LHD, RHD) by voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM). In the LHD group, HLL impairment tended to be affected by damage to the posterior limb of the internal capsule (PLIC). Walking capacity tended to be affected by a larger array of structures: PLIC and corona radiata, external capsule and caudate nucleus. In the RHD group, both HLL impairment and walking capacity were sensitive to damage in a much larger number of brain voxels. HLL impairment was affected by damage to the corona radiata, superior longitudinal fasciculus and insula. Walking was affected by damage to the same areas, plus the internal and external capsules, putamen, thalamus and parts of the perisylvian cortex. In both groups, voxel clusters have been found where damage affected FMA-LE and also 3MWT, along with voxels where damage affected only one of the measures (mainly 3MWT). In stroke, enduring ‘activity limitation’ is affected by damage to a much larger array of brain structures and voxels within specific structures, compared to enduring ‘impairment.’ Differences between the effects of left and right hemisphere damage are likely to reflect variation in motor-network organization and post-stroke re-organization related to hemispheric dominance. Further studies with larger sample size are required for the validation of these results. (shrink)

Starting with Jaakko Hintikka’s seminal work, epistemic logic has now grown up to a huge academic industry. When we look back to its history, however, there is a practical paradox. While Hintikka’s original purpose was to facilitate epistemological discussion, most subsequent work of epistemic logic has been done outside of philosophy, and has been ignored by most mainstream epistemologists. At the current point, one might naturally wonder, does epistemic logic still have something to do with epistemology? Along with Hintikka and (...) a growing number of formal epistemologists, we believe the answer is “yes”. Contemporary epistemology has largely focused on the goal of providing an analysis of knowledge and an answer to skepticism. To avoid skepticism, many epistemologists prefer to define knowledge in terms of evidence and relevant alternatives. A typical saying is that “in order to know that p, one only needs evidence to eliminate all relevant alternatives, rather than all alternatives”. We see such a project as perfectly congenial to the spirit of Hintikka’s epistemic logic. In this paper, we propose an epistemic logic to deal with evidence and relevant alternatives explicitly, and extend EREL to its dynamic version to investigate how different notions of knowledge behavior with the decrease and increase of relevant alternatives. To illustrate its philosophical application, we provide a new formalization of the so called factivity problem of epistemic contextualism. We conclude with some remarks on further developments of our framework. (shrink)

Highlighting the fluid nature of habitus/capital, this paper critiques a ‘rucksack approach’ (Erel, 2010) in the Bourdieusian studies of Chinese migrants’ cultural reproduction and social inclusion...

Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic charts current developments within the field of ethics and the role it plays in the study of moving images. It is the first collection of essays of its kind that brings together articles by film and media scholars from three continents, and provides multiple points of engagement of film with present and past histories, politics, myth making, and with core aspects of human subjectivity. The essays cover a wide range of topics, such as the (...) European Union; Europe during World War II and after; film genres; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; early American history, and recent catastrophic events. The collection includes an introductory chapter by Thomas Elsaesser as well as chapters by Kristian Feigelson, Règine-Mihal Friedman, Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni, Anton Kaes, Gertrud Koch, Odeya Kohen-Raz, Lihi Nagler, Judd Ne'eman, Bill Nichols, and Janet Walker. The contributors offer different approaches to the issue of film and ethics and ask whether there are specific characteristics of the moving image, or of film scholarship, that relate to ethical issues; and how discussing the engagement of both narrative and documentary film with representations of the Other, trauma, terrorism, the Holocaust, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may contribute to the re-shaping of past and current thoughts on these subjects. (shrink)