Theoretical problems concerning concepts of systems and measurement of behavior were encountered during experimental studies of the effects of electrical stimulation of the brain on the social behavior of a monkey colony. General problems involved in the description and measurement of behavior of natural systems, and especially of organisms are discussed. In animals with differentiated brain the general process of stimulation may be divided into four subprocesses: input, throughput, transput and output. Categories of behavior, temporal and spatial units, and logical (...) rules of homogeneity for sorting data and comparing measurements and categories, are discussed. Simple behavioral units are divided into: 1. Individual a. static or postural b. dynamic or gestural 2. Social a. static b. dynamic. Complex behavior is divided into: 1. Simultaneous 2. Sequential 3. Syntactic 4. Roles. The process of interpretation of data by the observer is assumed to be dependent upon actual behavior of the system, techniques of observation and experimentation, theoretical and technical processes of analysis, and synthesis and integration of data. Expression of behavior in mathematical terms insures greater accuracy than descriptive methods and enables data to be processed with computers. (shrink)

Fundamento: El Plan D de la carrera de Estomatología concibe la existencia de una disciplina principal integradora denominada Estomatología Integral, sobre la base de la concepción de interdisciplinariedad y la mayor flexibilización curricular. Objetivo: Realizar una valoración de la asignatura Atención Integral a la Familia II del plan D de la carrera de Estomatología. Métodos: Se realizó un estudio descriptivo transversal en la Facultad de Estomatología de la Universidad de Ciencias Médicas de Camaguey en Mayo 2015, mediante el análisis documental (...) del plan de estudio D y programa de la disciplina integradora, se exploraron criterios de profesores sobre las potencialidades y limitaciones del diseño curricular. Fueron encuestados directivos del proceso docente y profesores de experiencia. Resultados: En los objetivos instructivos de la carrera no se incluye el referente a la Estomatología Legal, pero está recogido en los problemas de salud, en los modos de actuación del modelo del profesional y en los objetivos del 4to año donde se imparte la asignatura. La formulación del primer objetivo instructivo se considera muy general y amplia. Conclusiones: La ubicación de la asignatura es correcta en la malla curricular. Tiene suficientes horas de Educación en el trabajo y es adecuada la proporción de las actividades teóricas; como aspectos negativos contenido resalta la extensión y amplitud del tercer tema y la escasez y pobre actualización de la literatura docente. Introduction: The Curriculum D of Dentistry career conceives the existence of a main integrated discipline called Comprehensive Dentistry on the basis of the multi-disciplinary conception and the most curricular flexibility. Objective: To make an assessment of the subject Family Comprehensive Attention II Curriculum D of Dentistry career. Methods: A descriptive-transverse study was performed in the Dentistry Faculty of the University of Medical Sciences in May 2015 by means of the documentary analysis of the Curriculum D and the syllabus of the comprehensive discipline, different professors´criteria were explored about the potencialities and limitations of the curricular design. The board of directors of the teaching process as well as experienced professors were interviewed. Results: The instructive objectives of the career are not included in Legal Dentistry but they are taken into account when dealing with heath problems, the ways of behavior of the future professional and the objectives of the 4th-year subject. The formulation of the first instructive objective is considered very general and broad. Conclusions: Its location is correct bearing in mind the curricular design. It contains enough hours for the practice at dental clinics and a correct gradation of the theoretical activities, a very broad and lengthy content in topic III as well as scarce and not updated literature were the negative aspects. (shrink)

Current research has focused on gender as a conditioning factor in students’ study choices, highlighting the existence of gender stereotypes associated with these choice. The general objective of this article is to analyse if there are differences based on sex in the choice of musical instruments in music conservatories. The methodology used is quantitative. We have analysed the data on enrolment in the different instrumental specialities of two public music conservatories in Seville (Spain) at the three levels of music education: (...) Basic, Professional and Higher Music Education. This article contrasts if there are instrumental specialities that are mostly chosen by one or the other sex, and to check if this sexual segregation has been produced by chance or can be explained by other causes. This investigation was carried out for a total of 4120 students from two different conservatories. The main conclusions of the study were the existence of feminized and masculinized instrumental families, and the relationship between the variables “students’ sex” and “instrumental families and musical specialities” was significant with a medium effect size. This research confirms that men and women choose the instruments that have traditionally been associated with their male or female roles respectively. (shrink)

I argue that rather than dismiss Foucault’s first book, Mental Illness and Personality, as an “apologetic exposition of Pavlov’s reflexology,” we ought see it as a valuable source documenting Foucault’s change of attitude towards psychology and the history of science in the early 1950s. I argue that there are two distinguishable strands that make up the text. The ‘frame’ of the book—the introduction, first chapter of the second part and conclusion of the book—is expressive of a critical attitude towards psychology, (...) and indicative of rather sophisticated conception of the history of science as a critical history aimed at bringing into view the unscientific forces that shape scientific labor. The ‘main body’ of the text—the first part and the second chapter of the second part—by contrast, reads as the history of the steady dialectical progress of the psychological sciences towards an ever more accurate understanding of mental illness. It is thus indicative to a naïve approach to psychology and to its history. The tension between the two strands of the book thus documents the starting point of Foucault’s then shifting attitudes toward the psychological sciences and the history of science, and the set of questions and sources that lead him to problematize his understanding of and approach to the latter. (shrink)

Background Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?Methods To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people’s beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics).Results Across (...) various bioethical issues (e.g., medically-assisted death, vaccine hesitancy, surrogacy, mandatory organ conscription, or genetically modified crops), consequentialist attitudes were associated with weaker beliefs in an objective moral truth. This association was not explained by domain-general reflectivity, theism, personality, normative uncertainty, or subjective knowledge.Conclusions We find a robust link between the way people characterize prescriptive disagreements and their sensibility to consequences. In addition, both societal consensus and personal conviction contribute to objectivist beliefs, but these effects appear to be asymmetric, i.e., stronger for opposition than for approval. (shrink)

Adaptive optics are techniques used for processing the spatial resolution of astronomical images taken from large ground-based telescopes. In this work, computational results are presented for a modified curvature sensor, the tomographic pupil image wavefront sensor, which measures the turbulence of the atmosphere, expressed in terms of an expansion over Zernike polynomials. Convolutional neural networks are presented as an alternative to the TPI-WFS reconstruction. This technique is a machine learning model of the family of artificial neural networks, which are widely (...) known for its performance as modeling and prediction technique in complex systems. Results obtained from the reconstruction of the networks are compared with the TPI-WFS reconstruction by estimating errors and optical measurements. The reconstructed wavefronts from both techniques are compared for wavefronts of 153 Zernike modes. For this case, a detailed comparison and grid search to find the most suitable neural network is performed, searching between multi-layer perceptron, CNN and recurrent networks topologies. In general, the best network was a CNN trained for TPI-WFS reconstruction, achieving better performance than the reconstruction software from TPI-WFS in most of the turbulent profiles, but the most significant improvements were found for higher turbulent profiles that have the lowest r0 values. (shrink)

We analyze the prestige of 1,500 scholars in economics, sociology, and management who have Spanish and French institutional affiliations operationalized by their h-index in Scopus and Google Scholar. We use a negative binomial count model to examine how some individual factors affect the h-index from both databases. The results show a non-monotonic relationship between the researchers’ career length and their h-index. There is a positive and statistically significant relationship between total research output and the h-index. The share of publications in (...) English over total publications has also a positive and statistically significant effect on the h-index, except in a single case, while the share of publications in other foreign languages does not have such effect. Finally, we found that the effects of the number of citations received by documents in English and by those in the vernacular language on the h-index vary according to the database, the country, and the discipline in question. (shrink)

Apoptosis is now widely recognized as a common form of cell death and represents a mechanism of cell clearance in many physiological situations where deletion of cells is required. Peptide growth factors, initially characterised as stimulators of cell proliferation, have now been shown to inhibit death in many cell types. Deprivation of growth factors leads to the induction of apoptosis, i.e. condensation of chromatin and degradation in oligonucleosomesized fragments, formation of plasma and nuclear membrane blebs and cell fragmentation into apoptotic (...) bodies which can be taken up by neighbouring cells. Here we discuss the mechanism(;s) by which growth factors may inhibit apoptosis. (shrink)

Whether Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of morality is best understood as an internal or as an external critique remains a matter of controversy. On the internalist interpretation (Ridley, Owen, Merrick ), the genealogical enterprise takes as its starting point the perspective being criticized, gradually revealing it to be untenable ‘from within.’ On the externalist interpretation (Leiter, and arguably Geuss, Williams, and Janaway ), this constraint is lifted; the starting point of the critique need not be the perspective being criticized, but may (...) be that of someone who already suspects the latter to be untenable. According to a common objection to ‘external critique’ interpretations, the limited-scope objection, since an external critique to a value-system could only work on an audience whose members were predisposed to abandon that system of values, ‘external critique’ interpretations impose a severe limitation on the transformative potential of Nietzsche’s project. ‘Internal critique’ interpretations, by contrast, can seem hard to reconcile with the polemical character of On the Genealogy of Morality (which lends the book its subtitle, Eine Streitschrift) and with Nietzsche’s frequent remarks to the effect his works were addressing a particular, ‘higher,’ kind of individual. -/- The overarching goal in this paper is to call into question the usefulness of the ‘internal-external’ or ‘immanent-transcendent’ dichotomy for understanding Nietzsche’s genealogical critique. I argue that the apparent usefulness of the distinction between external and internal critiques when approaching Nietzsche’s works rests on the assumption that any critique of values must itself be grounded on values that function as evaluative-critical standards. If the assumption is right, then one of two things, either the values that are deployed as standards coincide with those that are the target of critique, in which case the critique is internal, or they are not (etc.). Thus the assumption is liable to render us forgetful of a third possibility, that of a critical strategy that does not work by deploying (internal or external) values as standards of critical assessment, but by revealing something about the nature of value, and more precisely about the origin of any individual’s commitments to their values. -/- On the view that I defend, one of the crucial steps of Nietzsche’s genealogical method is to bring his reader to realize that any individual’s commitment to their values is expressive of and rooted in their commitment to preserve their way of life. Realizing this does not require that the reader abandon their own values. But it does require that they acknowledge that were they committed to a relevantly different way of life, they would subscribe to different values. And this, in turn, suffices to bring about a transformation in their understanding of and relationship to those commitments through the further realization that it is ultimately always up to them to undertake the project of taking distance from and ‘re-evaluating’ those values. (shrink)

La migración fronteriza es un fenómeno que cada día adquiere mayor importancia en el continente en un contexto de crisis de los países del Norte y del fortalecimiento económico de algunos países sudamericanos, como es el caso de Chile. En este sentido, interesa revisar el caso de la migración femenina a la región de Tarapacá en los últimos años, los motivos para migrar, la experiencia del cruce de la frontera y el lugar que ocupan las redes de apoyo en la (...) configuración de la migración fronteriza en el contexto de recepción. El análisis de dicha experiencia migratoria y el accionar de la Pastoral de Migraciones -de acuerdo al relato de las migrantes- permiten indagar sobre cómo se estructura la comunidad en destino, su constitución y seguimiento en una región fronteriza. Las características de las migrantes y de las redes de apoyo permiten explicar el acceso a nichos laborales específicos feminizados, la precariedad de las condiciones de establecimiento y las estrategias de movilidad fronteriza. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze the patterns of culture of honor within Spanish families. Each member of 271 Spanish four-member families completed a questionnaire containing scales for the culture of honor and for sociodemographic variables. The results show that intra-family similarities emerge. However, path analyses show that the gender and birth order of the child are relevant in predicting this similarity. In particular, the first-born child converges with their mother to a higher extent than the father regardless of their gender. (...) However, for the second-born child both parents instill their ideas about culture of honor in a gender congruent way. Furthermore, there are higher similarities within younger families, indicating a stronger influence from parents to children. Results are discussed in view of social role and gender social learning theories. (shrink)

Critical thinking is a complex, dynamic process formed by attitudes and strategic skills, with the aim of achieving a specific goal or objective. The attitudes, including the critical thinking attitudes, constitute an important part of the idea of good care, of the good professional. It could be said that they become a virtue of the nursing profession. In this context, the ethics of virtue is a theoretical framework that becomes essential for analyse the critical thinking concept in nursing care and (...) nursing science. Because the ethics of virtue consider how cultivating virtues are necessary to understand and justify the decisions and guide the actions. Based on selective analysis of the descriptive and empirical literature that addresses conceptual review of critical thinking, we conducted an analysis of this topic in the settings of clinical practice, training and research from the virtue ethical framework. Following JBI critical appraisal checklist for text and opinion papers, we argue the need for critical thinking as an essential element for true excellence in care and that it should be encouraged among professionals. The importance of developing critical thinking skills in education is well substantiated; however, greater efforts are required to implement educational strategies directed at developing critical thinking in students and professionals undergoing training, along with measures that demonstrate their success. Lastly, we show that critical thinking constitutes a fundamental component in the research process, and can improve research competencies in nursing. We conclude that future research and actions must go further in the search for new evidence and open new horizons, to ensure a positive effect on clinical practice, patient health, student education and the growth of nursing science. (shrink)

Insults elicit intense emotion. This study tests the hypothesis that one's social image, which is especially salient in honour cultures, influences the way in which one reacts to an insult. Seventy-seven honour-oriented and 72 non-honour oriented participants answered questions about a recent insult episode. Participants experienced both anger and shame in reaction to the insult. However, these emotions resulted in different behaviours. Anger led to verbal attack (i.e., criticising, insulting in return) among all participants. This relationship was explained by participants’ (...) motivation to punish the wrongdoer. Shame, on the other hand, was moderated by honour. Shame led to verbal disapproval of the wrongdoers behaviour, but only among the honour-oriented participants. This relationship was explained by these participants’ motivation to protect their social image. By contrast, shame led to withdrawal among non-honour-oriented participants. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the relationship that existed between Latin American writers, the Venezuelan Teresa de la Parra and the Chilean Gabriela Mistral. From a historical perspective, revealer an intellectual and emotional relationship, as well as literary, social and personal interests: through a series of scattered documents: letters and published articles by Mistral dedicated to de la Parra. These documents represent a testimony to the close friendship between the two, which helps to better understand the intellectual and sentimental contacts two writers, (...) Latin American pioneers in literary field in the twenties of the last century. (shrink)

Sociotype is a concept that allows a more comprehensive understanding about biosociology of undiagnosed rare diseases (URD). Sociotype is related to a genotype and a phenotype and it is an expression of the individual life world in society. In this paper, semiotic and hermeneutic analysis of papers published and selected about URD is developed. Te perspective followed in this research is aligned with the works of Barbieri and Peirce. Papers with the most social content have been selected and those with (...) a more biomedical content have been rejected. Te semiotics analysis has been divided in genotypic, phenotypic and sociotypic, and related to the hermeneutical perspective. It has been possible to understand the basis of semiotics elements of URD. Te general conclusion is that URD is a particular sociotype with a determined set of social characteristics. Tis paper opens research on the biosemiotic and hermeneutic perspective about URD. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to analyze the role that peer support plays in the incidence relationships between sociometric popularity and general self-concept based on sociometer theory. A total of 676 randomly selected secondary school students from the Basque Country between 12 and 18 years of age participated voluntarily. All of them completed a sociometric questionnaire, the Family and Friends Support Questionnaire, and the Dimensional Self-concept Questionnaire. Several models of structural equations were tested. The results indicate that sociometric popularity (...) is linked to self-concept through the perceived social support of peers. These results are discussed within the framework of positive psychology and its practical implications in the school context. (shrink)

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance of (...) one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance of (...) one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

Despite the promise to boost human potential and wellbeing, enhancement drugs face recurring ethical scrutiny. The present studies examined attitudes toward cognitive enhancement in order to learn more about these ethical concerns, who has them, and the circumstances in which they arise. Fairness-based concerns underlay opposition to competitive use—even though enhancement drugs were described as legal, accessible and affordable. Moral values also influenced how subsequent rewards were causally explained: Opposition to competitive use reduced the causal contribution of the enhanced winner’s (...) skill, particularly among fairness-minded individuals. In a follow-up study, we asked: Would the normalization of enhancement practices alleviate concerns about their unfairness? Indeed, proliferation of competitive cognitive enhancement eradicated fairness-based concerns, and boosted the perceived causal role of the winner’s skill. In contrast, purity-based concerns emerged in both recreational and competitive contexts, and were not assuaged by normalization. (shrink)

One of the objectives in the field of artificial intelligence for some decades has been the development of artificial agents capable of coexisting in harmony with people and other systems. The computing research community has made efforts to design artificial agents capable of doing tasks the way people do, tasks requiring cognitive mechanisms such as planning, decision-making, and learning. The application domains of such software agents are evident nowadays. Humans are experiencing the inclusion of artificial agents in their environment as (...) unmanned vehicles, intelligent houses, and humanoid robots capable of caring for people. In this context, research in the field of machine ethics has become more than a hot topic. Machine ethics focuses on developing ethical mechanisms for artificial agents to be capable of engaging in moral behavior. However, there are still crucial challenges in the development of truly Artificial Moral Agents. This paper aims to show the current status of Artificial Moral Agents by analyzing models proposed over the past two decades. As a result of this review, a taxonomy to classify Artificial Moral Agents according to the strategies and criteria used to deal with ethical problems is proposed. The presented review aims to illustrate (1) the complexity of designing and developing ethical mechanisms for this type of agent, and (2) that there is a long way to go (from a technological perspective) before this type of artificial agent can replace human judgment in difficult, surprising or ambiguous moral situations. (shrink)

In this research work we approach to the knowledge of undiagnosed diseases. These diseases are framed within the so-called rare diseases, because they are not frequent. They generate a series of conditions in the lives of the affected people and in their social relationships. This is the result of the semiotic break between the biological and the social code. This situation can force people with these diseases to be out of the social structure, and they also can be reduced their (...) capacity to make decisions. For this reason, it is necessary to develop semiotics bridges that connect the codes we have talked about. (shrink)

DNA methylation constitutes one of the pillars of epigenetics, relying on covalent bonds for addition and/or removal of chemically distinct marks within the major groove of the double helix. DNA methyltransferases, enzymes which introduce methyl marks, initially evolved in prokaryotes as components of restriction‐modification systems protecting host genomes from bacteriophages and other invading foreign DNA. In early eukaryotic evolution, DNA methyltransferases were horizontally transferred from bacteria into eukaryotes several times and independently co‐opted into epigenetic regulatory systems, primarily via establishing connections (...) with the chromatin environment. While C5‐methylcytosine is the cornerstone of plant and animal epigenetics and has been investigated in much detail, the epigenetic role of other methylated bases is less clear. The recent addition of N4‐methylcytosine of bacterial origin as a metazoan DNA modification highlights the prerequisites for foreign gene co‐option into the host regulatory networks, and challenges the existing paradigms concerning the origin and evolution of eukaryotic regulatory systems. (shrink)

A qualitative study with an exploratory, descriptive and documentary design that was conducted with the objective of identifying the elements to constitute a method for the analysis of accusations of and proceedings for professional ethics infringements. The method is based on underlying elements identified inductively during analysis of professional ethics hearings judged by and filed in the archives of the Regional Nursing Board of Santa Catarina, Brazil, between 1999 and 2007. The strategies developed were based on the results of an (...) analysis of the findings of fact (occurrences/infractions, causes and outcomes) contained in the records of 128 professional ethics hearings and on the structural elements (statements, rules and practices) identified in five example professional ethics cases. The strategies suggested for evaluating accusations of ethics infringements and the procedures involved in deliberating on ethics hearings constitute a generic proposal that will require adaptation to the context of specific professional ethics accusations. (shrink)

We present here a direct elementary construction of continuous utility functions on perfectly separable totally preordered sets that does not make use of the well-known Debreu’s open gap lemma. This new construction leans on the concept of a separating countable decreasing scale. Starting from a perfectly separable totally ordered structure, we give an explicit construction of a separating countable decreasing scale, from which we show how to get a continuous utility map.

The Kiki-Bouba effect comprises a relation between two abstract figures and two non-words: the star-shaped figure is called 'Kiki' and the rounded figure 'Bouba'. The effect is explained by a sound-vision synaesthesia: certain sounds are associated with certain shapes in a non-arbitrary manner.When we asked the participants to decide which of the two figures, the star-shaped or the rounded one, to call yin and which yang, some 85% choose the star-shaped figure as yin. There are previous cases of synaesthesia where (...) personality is attributed to numbers or letters. In our results, the word Kiki is overall happy, clever, small, thin, young, unpleasant, and nervous. The starshaped figure is overall clever, tall, small, slim, nervous, unpleasant, and upper-class. That is, the correspondence above all concerns the qualifying adjectives clever, unpleasant, and nervous, as well as the physical appearance small and thin. This brings us to the fat-thin effect. Cinema, literature, comics, and children's programmes are full of contrasting figures: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Laurel and Hardy , Asterix and Obelix, Tintin and Captain Haddock, Bert and Ernie , or the Spanish comic about very naughty twin boys called Zipi and Zape . Our main conclusion is that first names and last names are not entirely arbitrary. There is a correspondence between names and physical characteristics and concepts . The Kiki-Bouba effect is a semantic one. (shrink)

Bioethicists involved in end‐of‐life debates routinely distinguish between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’. Meanwhile, previous work in cognitive science has revealed that when people characterize behaviour as either actively ‘doing’ or passively ‘allowing’, they do so not purely on descriptive grounds, but also as a function of the behaviour’s perceived morality. In the present report, we extend this line of research by examining how medical students and professionals (N = 184) and laypeople (N = 122) describe physicians’ behaviour in end‐of‐life scenarios. (...) We show that the distinction between ‘ending’ a patient’s life and ‘allowing’ it to end arises from morally motivated causal selection. That is, when a patient wishes to die, her illness is treated as the cause of death and the doctor is seen as merely allowing her life to end. In contrast, when a patient does not wish to die, the doctor’s behaviour is treated as the cause of death and, consequently, the doctor is described as ending the patient’s life. This effect emerged regardless of whether the doctor’s behaviour was omissive (as in withholding treatment) or commissive (as in applying a lethal injection). In other words, patient consent shapes causal selection in end‐of‐life situations, and in turn determines whether physicians are seen as ‘killing’ patients, or merely as ‘enabling’ their death. (shrink)

We investigated the role of honour concerns in mediating the effect of nationality and gender on the reported intensity of anger and shame in reaction to insult vignettes. Spain, an honour culture, and The Netherlands, where honour is of less central significance, were selected for comparison. A total of 260 (125 Dutch, 135 Spanish) persons participated in the research. Participants completed a measure of honour concerns and answered questions about emotional reactions of anger and shame to vignettes depicting insults in (...) which type of threat was manipulated. It was found that Spanish participants responded especially intensely to insults that threaten family honour, and that this effect of nationality on emotional reactions to threats to family honour was mediated by individual differences in concern for family honour. (shrink)

Psychophysical studies of change blindness indicate that, at any instant, human observers are aware of detail in few parts of the visual field. Such results suggest, to some theorists, that human vision reconstructs only a few portions of the visual scene and that, to bridge the resulting representational gaps, it often lets physical objects serve as their own short-term memory. We propose that human vision reconstructs no portion of the visual scene, and that it never lets physical objects serve as (...) their own short-term memory. (shrink)

This theoretical paper proposes a new perspective to understand the moral distress of nurses more fully, using virtue ethics. Moral distress is a widely studied subject, especially with respect to the determination of its causes and manifestations. Increasing the theoretical depth of previous work using ethical theory, however, can create new possibilities for moral distress to be explored and analyzed. Drawing on more recent work in this field, we explicate the conceptual framework of the process of moral distress in nurses, (...) proposed by Ramos et al., using MacIntyrean virtue ethics. Our analysis considers the experience of moral distress in the context of a practice, enabling the adaptation of this framework using virtue ethics. The adoption of virtue ethics as an ethical perspective broadens the understanding of the complexity of nurses’ experiences of moral distress, since it is impossible to create a ready model that can cover all possibilities. Specifically, we describe how identity, social context, beliefs, and tradition shape moral discomfort, uncertainty, and sensitivity and how virtues inform moral judgments. Individuals, such as nurses, who are involved in a practice have a narrative history and a purpose ( telos) that guide them in every step of the process, especially in moral judgment. It is worth emphasizing that the process described is supported by the formation of moral competence that, if blocked, can lead to moral distress and deprofessionalization. It is expected that nurses seek to achieve the internal good of their practice, which legitimizes their professional practice and supports them in moral decision-making, preventing moral distress. (shrink)