The coronavirus disease pandemic fundamentally disrupted humans’ social life and behavior. Public health measures may have inadvertently impacted how people care for each other. This study investigated prosocial behavior, its association well-being, and predictors of prosocial behavior during the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and sought to understand whether region-specific differences exist. Participants from eight regions clustering multiple countries around the world responded to a cross-sectional online-survey investigating the psychological consequences of the first upsurge of lockdowns in spring 2020. Prosocial behavior (...) was reported to occur frequently. Multiple regression analyses showed that prosocial behavior was associated with better well-being consistently across regions. With regard to predictors of prosocial behavior, high levels of perceived social support were most strongly associated with prosocial behavior, followed by high levels of perceived stress, positive affect and psychological flexibility. Sociodemographic and psychosocial predictors of prosocial behavior were similar across regions. (shrink)

Ever since Clifford Geertz urged the “blurring of genres” in the social sciences, many scholars have considered the crossing of disciplinary boundaries a healthy alternative to rigidly maintaining them. But what precisely does the metaphor of “blurring” imply? By unpacking the varieties of visual experiences that are normally grouped under this rubric, this essay seeks to provide some precision to our understanding of the implications of fuzziness. It extrapolates from the blurring caused by differential focal distances, velocities of objects in (...) the visual field, and competing perspectival vantage points to comparable effects in the intersection of different scholarly disciplines. Arguing against the holistic implications of Geertz's metaphor, as well as the even more totalizing concept of “consilience” introduced by E. O. Wilson, it suggests that blurring implies new types of complexity between or among those disciplines. (shrink)

Synthetic biologists design and engineer organisms for a better and more sustainable future. While the manifold prospects are encouraging, concerns about the uncertain risks of genome editing affect public opinion as well as local regulations. As a consequence, biosafety and associated concepts, such as the Safe-by-design framework and genetic safeguard technologies, have gained notoriety and occupy a central position in the conversation about genetically modified organisms. Yet, as regulatory interest and academic research in genetic safeguard technologies advance, the implementation in (...) industrial biotechnology, a sector that is already employing engineered microorganisms, lags behind. The main goal of this work is to explore the utilization of genetic safeguard technologies for designing biosafety in industrial biotechnology. Based on our results, we posit that biosafety is a case of a changing value, by means of further specification of how to realize biosafety. Our investigation is inspired by the Value Sensitive Design framework, to investigate scientific and technological choices in their appropriate social context. Our findings discuss stakeholder norms for biosafety, reasonings about genetic safeguards, and how these impact the practice of designing for biosafety. We show that tensions between stakeholders occur at the level of norms, and that prior stakeholder alignment is crucial for value specification to happen in practice. Finally, we elaborate in different reasonings about genetic safeguards for biosafety and conclude that, in absence of a common multi-stakeholder effort, the differences in informal biosafety norms and the disparity in biosafety thinking could end up leading to design requirements for compliance instead of for safety. (shrink)

This groundbreaking handbook of character strengths and virtues is the first progress report from a prestigious group of researchers who have undertaken the systematic classification and measurement of widely valued positive traits. Character Strengths and Virtues classifies twenty-four specific strengths under six broad virtues that consistently emerge across history and culture. This book demands the attention of anyone interested in psychology and what it can teach about the good life.

As a 2006 Institute of Medicine report highlights, surprisingly little empirical attention has been paid to how prisoners arrive at decisions to participate in modern research. With our study, we aimed to fill this gap by identifying a more comprehensive range of factors as reported by prisoners themselves during semistructured interviews. Our participants described a diverse range of motives, both favoring and opposing their eventual decision to join. Many are well-recognized considerations among nonincarcerated clinical research participants, including a desire for (...) various forms of personal benefit, altruism, and concern about study risks and inconveniences. However, a number of influences seem unique to prisoners. Participants did not report that they were not coerced into enrolling, and they have even been under pressure not to enroll. However, many sought to enroll in order to obtain access to better health care, raising a concern about whether they were unfairly exploited. (shrink)

Tomando como marco de referencia la filosofía crítica kantiana, el artículo se plantea la cuestión del progreso moral de la humanidad. En primer lugar, examina las dificultades que en el contexto de tal filosofía presenta la pretensión de avanzar algo en lo moral. A continuación, aborda la posible contradicción existente entre la idea de progreso y la adscripción kantiana de lo moral al ámbito nouménico. Considera las diferentes alusiones que en la obra kantiana se encuentran en defensa de la tesis (...) que defiende el progreso moral del género humano, examinando los argumentos a favor y en contra de ellas. Finalmente, establece el estatus que debe tener en el contexto kantiano de reflexión la anticipación del posible progreso moral de la humanidad y la manera como éste habría de producirse. (shrink)

La integración y el uso de las TIC en los centros educativos es un proceso complejo en el que intervienen diversos factores, como son, el nivel de competencia digital docente, la infraestructura tecnológica o el acceso y uso de internet. De ahí que sea necesario abordar los estudios sobre TIC en educación desde enfoques multivariados. En este sentido, este estudio pretende conocer el uso de cinco herramientas digitales por parte de 474 estudiantes de E.S.O. en las aulas, para analizar posteriormente (...) las ventajas e inconvenientes de dicho uso para su aprendizaje. Se presentan los resultados y se discuten sus implicaciones. (shrink)

Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability – whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists' representational assumptions. We challenge this division of labor by arguing that structural priming provides an implicit method of (...) investigating linguistic representations that should end the current reliance on acceptability judgments. Moreover, structural priming has now reached sufficient methodological maturity to provide substantial evidence about such representations. We argue that evidence from speakers' tendency to repeat their own and others' structural choices supports a linguistic architecture involving a single shallow level of syntax connected to a semantic level containing information about quantification, thematic relations, and information structure, as well as to a phonological level. Many of the linguistic distinctions often used to support complex syntactic structure are instead captured by semantics; however, the syntactic level includes some specification of “missing” elements that are not realized at the phonological level. We also show that structural priming provides evidence about the consistency of representations across languages and about language development. In sum, we propose that structural priming provides a new basis for understanding the nature of language. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 333-348, May 2022.

Structural priming offers a powerful method for experimentally investigating the mental representation of linguistic structure. We clarify the nature of our proposal, justify the versatility of priming, consider alternative approaches, and discuss how our specific account can be extended to new questions as part of an interdisciplinary programme integrating linguistics and psychology as part of the cognitive sciences of language.

In this paper we address the issue of how to think about immunity. Many immunological writings suggest a straightforward option: the view that the immune system is primarily a system of defense, which naturally invites the talk of strong immunity and strong immune response. Despite their undisputable positive role in immunology, such metaphors can also pose a risk of establishing a narrow perspective, omitting from consideration phenomena that do not neatly fit those powerful metaphors. Building on this analysis, we argue (...) two things. First, we argue that the immune system is involved not only in defense. Second, by disentangling various possible meanings of ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ in immunology, we also argue that such a construal of immunity generally contributes to the distortion of the overall picture of what the immune system is, what it does, and why it sometimes fails. Instead, we propose to understand the nature of the immune system in terms of contextuality, regulation, and trade-offs. We suggest that our approach provides lessons for a general understanding of the organizing principles of the immune system in health and disease. For all this to work, we discuss a wide range of immunological phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper, we challenge one of the criticisms against the idea of a universal basic income, namely, that people will waste the support on high-end consumption. We rely on the literature from various disciplines from which we developed high- and low-UBI scenarios for respondents to decide what they would do if the state were to provide an unconditional stipend. We analyzed the multiple-choice responses, using an ordered probit, and the written explanations of the respondents’ choices, using content analysis. The (...) results suggest that while a higher UBI would increase consumption, it would likely be done responsibly. People with low incomes showed restraint in all categories. The qualitative analysis captures some of the complexities of people’s socioeconomic circumstances that support the notion of responsible consumption. The policy implication is that a UBI could be introduced at a low level and gradually increased to a level that maximizes societal benefits. (shrink)

Although information-processing theories cannot provide a full explanatory account of P-consciousness, there is less conflation and confusion in cognitive psychology than Block suspects. Some of the reasoning that Block criticises can be interpreted plausibly in the light of a folk psychological view of the relation between P-consciousness and A-consciousness.

Cognitive reappraisal is an important emotion regulation strategy that shows considerable developmental change in its use and effectiveness. This paper presents a systematic review of the evidence base regarding the development of cognitive reappraisal from early childhood through adolescence and provides methodological recommendations for future research. We searched Scopus, PsycINFO, and ERIC for empirical papers measuring cognitive reappraisal in normative samples of children and youth between the ages of 3 and 18 years published in peer-reviewed journals through August 9th, 2018. (...) We identified 118 studies that met our inclusion criteria. We first present a quantitative review of the methodologies used to investigate cognitive reappraisal in children and adolescents, with attention to variations in methodologies by the sample age range. We then present a qualitative review of findings with attention to: the age at which children begin to effectively use cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions, and developmental changes in cognitive reappraisal from early childhood through adolescence. We consider how methodological differences may contribute to inconsistencies in findings, highlight gaps in the literature that remain to be addressed, and make recommendations for future directions. (shrink)

Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer (henceforth Levelt et al. 1999) propose a model of production incorporating a lemma stratum, which is concerned with the syntactic characteristics of lexical entries. We suggest that syntactic priming experiments provide evidence about how such syntactic information is represented, and that this evidence can be used to extend Levelt et al.'s model. Evidence from syntactic priming experiments also supports Levelt et al.'s conjecture that the lemma stratum is shared between the production and comprehension systems.