Patient-reported outcomes are frequently used for medical decision making, at the levels of both individual patient care and healthcare policy. Evidence increasingly shows that PROs may be influenced by patients’ response shifts and dispositions. We identify how response shifts and dispositions may influence medical decisions on both the levels of individual patient care and health policy. We provide examples of these influences and analyse the consequences from the perspectives of ethical principles and theories of just distribution. If influences of response (...) shift and disposition on PROs and consequently medical decision making are not considered, patients may not receive optimal treatment and health insurance packages may include treatments that are not the most effective or cost-effective. We call on healthcare practitioners, researchers, policy makers, health insurers, and other stakeholders to critically reflect on why and how such patient reports are used. (shrink)

Die Verantwortung fur das Leben und die Hochachtung vor dem Mitmenschen lebt Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schleissheimer in seinem Philosophieren. Aus der Begegnung mit ihm versuchen Freunde, Kollegen und Schuler diesen Anspruch fur ihr Fachgebiet aufzugreifen.".

Für die Rekonstruktion der Begriffsbüdung ergeben sich folgende Schwerpunkte: a. Die Erlebnisebene, die irüialtlich nur dem Einzelsubjekt zugänglich ist, muß so bestimmt werden, daß sie über ihre strukturellen Eigenschaften Grundlage eines intersubjektiven Begriffsbüdungsprozesses werden kann. b. Es ist ein Verfahren anzugeben, mit dessen Hilfe der Zusammenhang zwischen Begriffen, der Grundlage ihrer Rückführbarke it ist, aufgedeckt, werden kann. Die zentrale Rolle zur Lösung beider Probleme kommt der Konstruktion des (objektiven) Raum-Zeitschemes zu.

Für die Rekonstruktion der Begriffsbüdung ergeben sich folgende Schwerpunkte: a. Die Erlebnisebene, die irüialtlich nur dem Einzelsubjekt zugänglich ist, muß so bestimmt werden, daß sie über ihre strukturellen Eigenschaften Grundlage eines intersubjektiven Begriffsbüdungsprozesses werden kann. b. Es ist ein Verfahren anzugeben, mit dessen Hilfe der Zusammenhang zwischen Begriffen, der Grundlage ihrer Rückführbarke it ist, aufgedeckt, werden kann. Die zentrale Rolle zur Lösung beider Probleme kommt der Konstruktion des (objektiven) Raum-Zeitschemes zu.

Little is known about the impact of context on the meaning of emotion words. In the present study, we used a semantic profiling instrument to investigate features representing five emotion components of 11 emotion words in situational contexts involving success or failure. We compared these to the data from an earlier study in which participants evaluated the typicality of features out of context. Profile analyses identified features for which typicality changed as a function of context for all emotion words, except (...) contentment, with appraisal features being most frequently affected. Those context effects occurred for both hypothesised basic and non-basic emotion words. Moreover, both data sets revealed a four-dimensional structure. The four dimensions were largely similar. The results suggest that context may not change the underlying dimensionality but affects facets of the meaning of emotion words. (shrink)

Aesthetic emotions are elicited by different sensory impressions generated by music, visual arts, literature, theater, film, or nature scenes. Recently, the AESTHEMOS scale has been developed to facilitate the empirical assessment of such emotions. In this article we report a semantic profile analysis of aesthetic emotion terms that had been used for the development of this scale, using the GRID approach. This method consists of obtaining ratings of emotion terms on a set of meaning facets which represent five components of (...) the emotion process. The aims here were to determine the dimensionality of the GRID features when applied to aesthetic emotions and compare it to published results for emotion terms in general, and to examine the internal organization of the domain of aesthetic emotion terms in order to identify salient clusters of these items based on the similarity of their feature profiles on the GRID. Exploratory Principal Component Analyses suggest a four-dimensional structure of the semantic space consisting of valence, power, arousal, and novelty, converging with earlier GRID studies on large sets of standard emotion terms. Using cluster analyses, 15 clusters of aesthetic emotion terms with similar GRID feature profiles were identified, revealing the internal organization of the aesthetic emotion terms domain and meaningful subgroups of aesthetic emotions. While replication for further languages is required, these findings provide a solid basis for further research and methodological development in the realm of aesthetic emotions. (shrink)

Objectives:Social isolation is increasing in aging societies and several studies have shown a relation with worse cognition in old age. However, less is known about the association in the oldest-old (85+); the group that is at highest risk for both social isolation and dementia. Methods:Analyses were based on follow-up 5 to 9 of the longitudinal German study on aging, cognition, and dementia in primary care patients (AgeCoDe) and the study on needs, health service use, costs, and health-related quality of life (...) in a large sample of oldest-old primary care patients (AgeQualiDe), a multi-center population-based prospective cohort study. Measurements included the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6), with a score below 12 indicating social isolation, as well as the Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) as an indicator of cognitive function. Results:Dementia-free study participants (n = 942) were M = 86.4 (SD = 3.0) years old at observation onset, 68.2% were women. One third (32.3%) of them were socially isolated. Adjusted linear hybrid mixed effects models revealed significantly lower cognitive function in individuals with smaller social networks (β = 0.5, 95% CI = 0.3-0.7, p <.001). Moreover, changes in an individual's social network size were significantly associated with cognitive changes over time (β = 0.2, 95% CI = 0.1-0.4, p =.003), indicating worse cognitive function with shrinking social networks. Conclusion:Social isolation is highly prevalent among oldest-old individuals, being a risk factor for decreases in cognitive function. Consequently, it is important to maintain a socially active lifestyle into very old age. Likewise, this calls for effective ways to prevent social isolation. (shrink)

Widowhood is common in old age, can be accompanied by serious health consequences and is often linked to substantial changes in social network. Little is known about the impact of social isolation on the development of depressive symptoms over time taking widowhood into account. We provide results from the follow-up 5 to follow-up 9 from the longitudinal study AgeCoDe and its follow-up study AgeQualiDe. Depression was measured with GDS-15 and social isolation was assessed using the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6). (...) The group was aligned of married and widowed people in old age and education through entropy balancing. Linear mixed models were used to examine the frequency of occurrence of depressive symptoms for widowed and married elderly people depending on the risk of social isolation. Our study shows that widowhood alone does not lead to an increased occurrence of depressive symptoms. However, "widowed oldest old", who are also at risk of social isolation, have significantly more depressive symptoms than those without risk. In the group of "married oldest old", women have significantly more depressive symptoms than men, but isolated and non-isolated do not differ. Especially for people who have lost a spouse, the social network changes significantly and increases the risk for social isolation. This represents a risk factor for the occurrence of depressive symptoms. (shrink)

In a globalized world nation state governments are no longer able to control the behaviour of global economic actors via legislation and execution. At the same time transnational organizations such as the UN, the ILO or the WTO have not yet established a suitable world order for the global economy. Critics of globalization raise concerns that in many countries multinational firms and their suppliers do not comply to human rights or to social and environmental standards. At the same time, local (...) governments do not enforce these standards and transnational organizations are not allowed to intervene because of the principle of sovereignity. In the present paper I analyse the conclusions that can be drawn from economic free trade theory and from postmodern philosophy concerning the behaviour of multinational firms in developing countries. Despite their paradigmatical differences both these approaches come to similar results. (shrink)

This book provides an insightful analysis of the moral and ethical values that underpin Japanese culture and society. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on (...) the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, have the ability to acquire knowledge about their users’ movements not only within SNSs but also beyond SNS boundaries, particularly among websites that embedded SNS widgets such as Google’s Plus One button, Facebook’s Like button, and Twitter’s Tweet button. In this paper, we analysed the privacy implication of such a practice from a moral perspective by applying Helen Nissenbaum’s decision heuristic derived from her (...) contextual integrity framework in order to answer the question of whether or not an online user’s privacy is being violated by this practice. (shrink)

Modern society is challenged by a loss of efficiency in national governance systems values, and lifestyles. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse builds upon a conception of organizational legitimacy that does not appropriately reflect these changes. The problems arise from the a-political role of the corporation in the concepts of cognitive and pragmatic legitimacy, which are based on compliance to national law and on relatively homogeneous and stable societal expectations on the one hand and widely accepted rhetoric assuming that all members (...) of society benefit from capitalist production on the other. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to moral legitimacy, from an output and power oriented approach to an input related and discursive concept of legitimacy. This shift creates a new basis of legitimacy and involves organizations in processes of active justification vis-à-vis society rather than simply responding to the demands of powerful groups. We consider this a step towards the politicization of the corporation and attempt to re-embed the debate on corporate legitimacy into its broader context of political theory, while reflecting the recent turn from a liberal to a deliberative concept of democracy. (shrink)

Toward the end of Light in August, in the climactic scene in Chapter 1 where the authorities of justice pursue the elusive Joe Christmas through the streets of Jefferson, William Faulkner introduces a new character, Percy Grimm, a twenty-five-year-old captain in the State National Guard who has relentlessly acquired the rank of a special deputy for the search. As the town closes for the weekend, Grimm keeps vigil at a downtown store where other townsfolk have begun a poker game to (...) stay awake through the night as the search goes on. In their zeal to uphold law and justice, his men revel in their fantastic make-believe that they are doing the work of “a hidden and unsleeping and omnipotent eye watching the doings of men.” The poker game goes on through Saturday night until Christmas is spotted and given chase. As Grimm runs through the streets after the fleeing man, Faulkner presents to us the deputy's stream of thought from an omniscient point of view: “There was nothing vengeful about him either, no fury, no outrage. He was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the Board” (437). Through the rest of the chapter, Grimm, who has not participated in the poker game at all, thinks and acts as if he is engaged in a chess game, not as a player but as the stake or the pawn in a board game in which Jefferson is the board on which he and Christmas are being moved from place to place by two larger forces, he by the benevolent Providence and Christmas by the powers opposed to God. Finally, when Christmas is cornered and fatally shot in Reverend Hightower's kitchen, this fantasized game seems to end. (shrink)

Every civilized society treasures through its folk tales and folk myths the elements of its native tribal life as points of cultural reference. The tribe not only acts as a foil to our culture, but also sustains its very being and gauges the degree of progress and change in the civilization that we uphold. This interdependence has a vital force: insofar as civilized societies define themselves by the distance they have built up between themselves and their respective primitive societies, a (...) civilized culture without its indigenous tribal past risks the authenticity of its process of change to challenge and doubt. Hence, our adulation of distance in both time and space between ourselves and our tribal forefathers, and our eagerness to recognize, maintain, and even glorify our tribes—a necessary syllogism in our postulation of a self-preserving argument. In a peculiarly chiastic way, we thrive on our existential reliance on the very primitiveness that we seek to repudiate as characteristic of a world past. We celebrate our present by eulogizing our past, and to fit the tribes in the large scheme of our self-definition we iconize them. These idealized images hide a creative mask through which we embrace the romantic myths of our respective origins and progress; the parades we arrange for our tribal history—through performance on our streets, or through semantics in our literature—subtly embody this dependence. (shrink)

Models of cognitive vulnerability claim that depressive symptoms arise as a result of an interaction between negative affect and cognitive reactions, in the form of dysfunctional attitudes and negative inferential style. We present a model that complements this approach by focusing on the appraisal processes that elicit and differentiate everyday episodes of emotional experience, arguing that individual differences in appraisal patterns can foster negative emotional experiences related to depression. In particular, dispositional appraisal biases facilitating the elicitation of these emotions more (...) frequently and more intensely. This, in turn, is likely to have a negative influence on cognitive processing and emotion regulation in general. (shrink)

This book defends a form of ethical intuitionism, according to which (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know some of these truths through a kind of immediate, intellectual awareness, or "intuition"; and (iii) our knowledge of moral truths gives us reasons for action independent of our desires. The author rebuts all the major objections to this theory and shows that the alternative theories about the nature of ethics all face grave difficulties.

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

A definition of emotion common to the affective sciences is an urgent desideratum. Lack of such a definition is a constant source of numerous misunderstandings and a series of mostly fruitless debates. There is little hope that there ever will be agreement on a common definition of emotion, given the sacred traditions of the disciplines involved and the egos of the scholars working in these disciplines. Our aim here is more modest. We propose a list of elements for a working (...) definition of emotion and discuss the justification for the inclusion of elements from our respective perspectives (philosophy and psychology). This working partial definition may at least serve as a litmus test to examine theories of emotion, old and new, across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

Part I: The representation of life -- Can life be given a real definition? -- The representation of the living individual -- The representation of the life-form itself -- Part II: Naive action theory -- Types of practical explanation -- Naive explanation of action -- Action and time -- Part III: Practical generality -- Two tendencies in practical philosophy -- Practices and dispositions as sources of the goodness of individual actions -- Practice and disposition as sources of individual action.