Empathy is the combined ability to interpret the emotional states of others and experience resultant, related emotions. The relation between prefrontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and emotion in children is well known. The association between positive emotion (assessed via parent report), empathy (measured via observation), and second-by-second brain electrical activity (recorded during a pleasurable task) was investigated using a sample of one hundred twenty-eight 6- to 10-year-old children. Contentment related to increasing left frontopolar activation (p < .05). Empathic concern and positive empathy (...) related to increasing right frontopolar activation (ps < .05). A second form of positive empathy related to increasing left dorsolateral activation (p < .05). This suggests that positive affect and (negative and positive) empathy both relate to changes in prefrontal activity during a pleasurable task. (shrink)

In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The cognitive mechanism of attention has often been compared to consciousness, because attention and consciousness appear to share similar qualities. But, Montemayor and Haladjian point out, attention is defined functionally, whereas consciousness is generally defined in terms of its phenomenal character without a clear functional purpose. They offer new insights and proposals about how best to understand and study the relationship between (...) consciousness and attention by examining their functional aspects. The book's ultimate conclusion is that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. -/- Undertaking a rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work on attention and consciousness, Montemayor and Haladjian propose a spectrum of dissociation—a framework that identifies the levels of dissociation between consciousness and attention—ranging from identity to full dissociation. They argue that conscious attention, the focusing of attention on the contents of awareness, is constituted by overlapping but distinct processes of consciousness and attention. Conscious attention, they claim, evolved after the basic forms of attention, increasing access to the richest kinds of cognitive contents. -/- Montemayor and Haladjian's goal is to help unify the study of consciousness and attention across the disciplines. A focused examination of conscious attention will, they believe, enable theoretical progress that will further our understanding of the human mind. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas inherits two distinct conceptions of the virtuous human being. From Aristotle, he receives a vision of harmony and human achievement: through the process of habituation, the distinct parts of the virtuous soul are operating as one under the guidance of reason. From Augustine, Aquinas receives a vision of moral struggle and victory through divine assistance: the virtuous person is able to resist the inclinations of the flesh through virtues that are given by God and only fully actualized in (...) the next life. This dissertation explores an underappreciated area of Aquinas’s thought—on the topic of growth in the infused virtues—where he brings these teachings of Aristotle and Augustine into a brilliant harmony. In order to fully understand and appreciate Aquinas’s teaching on growth in infused virtue, one must first understand the essence of the infused virtues and their increase. This is the goal of Chapters Two and Three. In Chapter Two, I explore Aquinas’s discussion of habits in the Summa Theologiae by tracing three important topics: the essence of habits, the cause of habits, and the increase of habits. In Chapter Three, I elucidate Aquinas’s teaching on the essence of the infused virtues and situate these important virtues within his picture of the flourishing human life. The fourth chapter lays out Aquinas’s teaching on growth in infused virtue. I develop a metaphysical account of increase in infused virtue and pay careful attention to the associated stages. The chapter concludes with a close examination of the important imperfections that Aquinas associates with the infused virtues. I demonstrate that growth in infused virtue—rather than the development of the acquired virtues —is an effective remedy for these imperfections. In the concluding chapter, I emphasize the ways in which Aquinas’s understanding of growth in infused virtue represents the deepest point of his harmony of Aristotle and Augustine. I also situate my project among two prominent interpretive trends in Thomistic literature and highlight two important implications of the project. (shrink)

Prospective memory (PM) is the accurate execution of an intention in the future. PM may be negatively impacted by negative affect, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Rumination may increase the frequency of task-irrelevant thoughts, which deplete attentional capacity and reduce performance. To date, no studies have examined state and trait rumination on an online measure of PM. The present study examined the effects of state and trait rumination on an event-based, focal PM task embedded within a one-back task over (...) multiple sessions. 95 non-depressed adults (18–53 years) completed measures of state/trait rumination, mood, and PM on at least two occasions. Using multi-level modelling, we found that a derived measure of trait rumination, but not an established trait rumination survey, nor negative mood, predicted poorer PM accuracy. These novel findings demonstrate that trait rumination may partially underlie the association between negative affect & PM in a non-clinical sample, and highlight the potential of online methods to study PM. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas and the Infused Moral Virtues by Angela McKay KnobelThomas M. Osborne Jr.KNOBEL, Angela McKay. Aquinas and the Infused Moral Virtues. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021. 214 pp. Cloth, $65.00This book is the first substantial English monograph on Aquinas's account of the infused virtues in many years, and the most significant treatment of the issue since Gabriel Bullet, Vertus morales infuses et vertus morales (...) acquises selon Saint Thomas d'Aquin (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1958). The infused virtues are about, or they are intrinsically ordered to, the supernatural end of human beings. Aquinas was among the first to argue that the infused virtues include not only the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, but also supernatural counterparts to the acquired virtues, which are proportionate to the natural end of humans. These infused moral virtues are infused with charity and lost with mortal sin. Aquinas never addressed at length the relationship between acquired [End Page 144] and infused moral virtues, and many theologians rejected Aquinas's position that there are infused moral virtues.Knobel's book has two parts. The first part of the book consists of three chapters about Aquinas's own views. Chapter 1 is on natural virtue, which can be acquired through the agent's own efforts. Knobel emphasizes the way in which this virtue is proportionate to the natural end and abilities of humans. She correctly notes that Aquinas thinks that humans can perform such virtuous acts without grace. However, since she does not distinguish between morally good acts and morally good agents, she does not adequately address Aquinas's view of how sinners without grace might possess acquired virtue. Additionally, although she correctly notes the way in which moral virtue orders the agent to the end, it is often unclear whether she is discussing the proximate end of the will (which is an object), a further end (as when someone steals to commit adultery), or the ultimate end (which is God as the object of charity or the self as an object of disordered love). For example, she writes, "[I]f an act is not sinful, it cannot be ordered to an evil end." She might be making the uncontroversial claim that good acts are made evil when directed to a bad end, but in her argument she seems to be making the stronger claim that someone with a disordered ultimate end cannot habitually order good acts to such an end.Chapter 2 is on the infused virtues. Knobel notes that for Aquinas synderesis, which is a habit of grasping first practical principles, is a seed of the natural virtues, and that faith, which grasps revealed principles, plays this role in infused virtue. She shows how infused moral virtues, which share the same matter as the acquired moral virtues, have different ends and rules than the acquired virtues. Chapter 3 concerns Aquinas's account of the relationship between the acquired and infused virtues, and in particular the infused moral virtues. Knobel draws attention to texts in which Aquinas argues that the two coexist in someone who has grace, but she states that this coexistence is contradicted in the discussion of Macrobius's fourfold division of virtue in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 61, a. 5). In this article, she thinks, acquired virtue is political virtue, and a stage toward infused virtue. She does not address how Aquinas uses the term "political virtue" differently in different texts, and how the schema of four virtues in this text might be read as describing both four stages of acquired virtue and four stages of infused virtue. Knobel supports her view—that those with grace lack acquired virtue—by claiming that Aquinas consistently states that there is no acquired virtue in heaven. This view only tenuously (at best) supports her point that acquired virtue does not exist in this life among those in a state of grace. Moreover, Aquinas seems to suggest that acquired virtue persists in the next life in ST I-II, q. 67, a. 1-2.The second part of the book is a criticism of contemporary interpretations of Aquinas, and an exposition of... (shrink)

Theories of affective influences on cognition posit that negative mood may increase cognitive load, causing a decrement in task performance (Seibert & Ellis, [1991]. Irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states, and cognitive task performance. Memory & Cognition, 19(5), 507–513), or cause a shift to more analytic thinking, which benefits tasks requiring attention to detail (Schwarz & Clore, [1983]. Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), (...) 513–523). We previously reported that individuals who are higher in the trait of emotional reactivity performed better on an inhibitory task with increasing negative mood whereas low-reactive individuals showed the converse pattern (Gabel & McAuley, [2018]. Does mood help or hinder executive functions? Reactivity may be the key. Personality and Individual Differences, 128, 94–99; [2020]. React to act: Negative mood, response inhibition, and the moderating role of emotional reactivity. Motivation and Emotion, 44(6), 862–869). Because high-reactive individuals are more accustomed to negative affect (Nock et al., [2008]. The emotion reactivity scale: Development, evaluation, and relation to self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Behavior Therapy, 39(2), 107–116), we speculated that negative mood engendered analytic thinking but without a task-incongruent increase in cognitive load – thereby facilitating performance. Here, we induced a heuristic or analytic approach to information processing prior to performance of an inhibitory task and expected different results pending the thinking style induced. In the heuristic condition, increasing negative mood was associated with better performance for high-reactive participants but not their low-reactive counterparts. In the analytic condition, increasing negative mood was associated with better performance irrespective of emotional reactivity. Our results are consistent with the notion that negative mood engenders analytic thinking which may benefit response inhibition provided it does not increase task-incongruent cognitive load. (shrink)

Although the literature has focused on individual differences in authenticity, recent findings suggest that authenticity is sensitive to context; that is, it is also a state. We extended this perspective by examining whether incidental affect influences authenticity. In three experiments, participants felt more authentic when in a relatively positive than negative mood. The causal role of affect in authenticity was consistent across a diverse set of mood inductions, including explicit (Experiments 1 and 3) and implicit (Experiment 2) methods. (...) The link between incidental affect and state authenticity was not moderated by ability to down-regulate negative affect (Experiments 1 and 3) nor was it explained by negative mood increasing private self-consciousness or decreasing access to the self system (Experiment 3). The results indicate that mood is used as information to assess one's sense of authenticity. (shrink)

Can you think of a meme that made you laugh or a political post that made you angry? These examples illustrate how social media use (SMU) impacts how people feel. Similarly, how people feel when they initiate SMU may impact the emotional effects of SMU. Someone feeling happy may feel more positively during SMU, whereas someone feeling sad may feel more negatively. Using an experimental design, we examined whether following SMU, those in a happy mood would experience increases (...) in positive affect (PA) and those in a sad mood would experience increases in negative affect (NA). A large sample of college students (N = 703) were randomly assigned to a happy, sad, or neutral mood induction before SMU. PA and NA were assessed at baseline, post-mood induction, and after SMU. Contrary to hypotheses, after SMU, people in happy moods experienced decreases in PA, and those in sad moods experienced decreases in NA, reflecting SMU having a dampening effect on emotions. PA and NA were significantly lower after SMU compared to baseline and did not vary by condition. How young adults feel when they log onto SMU matters in understanding how SMU impacts PA and NA, but on average, emotional experiences are dampened. (shrink)

Although the topic of data-sharing has boomed in the past few years, practices of datasharing have attracted only scant attention within working groups and scientific cooperation (peer-to-peer data-sharing). To understand these practices, the author draws on Max Weber’s concept of social relationship, conceptualizing data-sharing as social action that takes place within a social relationship. The empirical material consists of interviews with 34 researchers representing five disciplines—linguistics, biology, psychology, computer sciences, and neurosciences. The analysis identifies three social forms of data-sharing (...) in peer-to-peer relationships: (a) closed communal sharing, which is based on a feeling of belonging together; (b) closed associative sharing, in which the participants act on the basis of an agreement; and (c) open associative sharing, which is oriented to “institutional imperatives” (Merton) and to formal regulations. The study shows that far more data-sharing is occurring in scientific practice than seems to be apparent from a concept of open data alone. If the main goal of open-data policy programs is to encourage researchers to increase access to their data, it could be instructive to study the three forms of data-sharing to improve the understanding of why and how scientists make their data accessible to other researchers. (shrink)

Sagvolden, Johansen, Aase, and Russell (Sagvolden et al.) examine attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at levels of analysis ranging from neurotransmitters to behavior. At the behavioral level they attribute aspects of ADHD to anomalies of delay-of-reinforcement gradients. With a normal gradient, responses followed after a long delay by a reinforcer may share in the effects of that reinforcer; with a diminished or steepened gradient they may fail to do so. Steepened gradients differentially select rapidly emitted responses (hyperactivity), and they limit the (...) effectiveness with which extended stimuli become conditioned reinforcers, so that observing behavior is less well maintained (attention deficit). Impulsiveness also follows from steepened gradients, which increase the effectiveness of smaller, more immediate consequences relative to larger, more delayed ones. Individuals who vary in the degree to which their delay gradients are steepened will show different balances between hyperactivity and attention deficit. Given the range of ADHD phenomena addressed, it may be unnecessary to appeal to additional behavioral processes such as extinction deficit. Extinction deficit is more likely a derivative of attention deficit, in that failure to attend to stimuli differentially correlated with extinction should slow its progress. The account suggests how relatively small differences in delay gradients early in development might engender behavioral interactions leading to very large differences later on. The steepened gradients presumably originate in properties of neurotransmitter function, but behavioral interventions that use consistently short delays of reinforcement to build higher-order behavioral units as a scaffolding to support complex cognitive and social skills may nonetheless be feasible. Key Words: ADHD; attention deficit; delay gradient; exponential decay; extinction deficit; hyperactivity; impulsiveness; intervention; observing responses; self-control. Footnotes1000 Jeffrey Gray was the BBS Editor for this treatment. When he accepted Sagvolden et al. for publication, he invited Catania, who was one of the reviewers of the original submission, to prepare a precommentary. Com-mentators were then invited to respond to the Sagvolden et al. article, to the Catania precommentary, or to both. (shrink)

Awareness of internal bodily sensations and its connection to complex socioemotional abilities like empathy has been postulated, yet the functional neural circuitry they share remains poorly understood. The present fMRI study employs independent component analysis to investigate which empathy facet shares resting-state functional connectivity and/or BOLD variability with IA. Healthy participants viewed an abstract nonsocial movie demonstrated to evoke strong rsFC in brain networks resembling rest, and resultant rsFC and rsBOLD data were correlated with self-reported empathy and IA questionnaires. We (...) demonstrate a bidirectional behavioral and neurobiological relationship between empathy and IA, depending on the type of empathy interrogated: Affective empathy and IA share both rsFC and rsBOLD, while Cognitive empathy and IA only share rsBOLD. Specifically, increased rsFC in the right inferior frontal operculum of a larger attention network was associated with increased vicarious experience but decreased awareness of inner body sensations. Furthermore, increased rsBOLD between brain regions of an interoceptive network was related to increased sensitivity to internal sensations along with decreased Affective empathy. Finally, increased rsBOLD between brain regions subserving a mentalizing network related to not only an improved ability to take someone’s perspective, but also a better sense of mind-body interconnectedness. Overall, these findings suggest that the awareness of one’s own internal body changes is related to the socioemotional ability of feeling and understanding another’s emotional state and critically, that this relationship is reflected in the brain’s resting state neuroarchitecture. Methodologically, this work highlights the importance of utilizing rsBOLD as a complementary window alongside rsFC to better understand neurological phenomena. Our results may be beneficial in aiding diagnosis in clinical populations such as autism spectrum disorder, where participants may be unable to complete tasks or questionnaires due to the severity of their symptoms. (shrink)

Can transfusions of blood plasma slow down ageing or even rejuvenate people? Recent preclinical studies and experimental tests inspired by the technique known as parabiosis have aroused great media attention, although for now there is no clear evidence of their effectiveness. This line of research and the interest it is triggering testify to the prominent role played by the idea of combating the “natural” ageing process in the scientific and social agenda. While seeking to increase the duration of healthy (...) living time may be considered a duty, it also raises ethical questions about how to pursue this goal. Specifically, therapies and techniques accessible only to a fraction of the population seem destined to exponentially increase social inequality and to produce undesirable consequences. In this article we address the issue precisely in the light of the prospected use of plasma for the rejuvenation of a small elite of people. (shrink)

This article discusses the concept of joint attention and the different skills underlying its development. Research in developmental psychology clearly states that the development of skills to understand, manipulate and coordinate attentional behavior plays a pivotal role for imitation, social cognition and the development of language. However, beside the fact that joint attention has recently received an increasing interest in the robotics community, existing models concentrate only on partial and isolated elements of these phenomena. In the line of (...) Tomasello’s research, we argue that joint attention is much more than simultaneous looking because it implies a shared intentional relation to the world. This requires skills for attention detection, attention manipulation, social coordination and, most importantly, intentional understanding. After defining joint attention and its challenges, the current state-of-the-art of robotic and computational models relevant for this issue is discussed in relation to a developmental timeline drawn from results in child studies. From this survey, we identify open issues and challenges that still need to be addressed to understand the development of the various aspects of joint attention and conclude with the potential contribution of robotic models. (shrink)

Meditation has been for long time avoided as a scientific theme because of its complexity and its religious connotations. Fortunately, in the last years, it has increasingly been studied within different neuroscientific experimental protocols. Attention and concentration are surely among the most important topics in these experiments. Notwithstanding this, inhibition of emotions and discursive thoughts are equally important to understand what is at stake during those types of mental processes. I philosophically and technically analyse and compare results from neuroimaging (...) studies, produced by leading authorities on the theme, dealing with two types of meditation: "one-pointed concentration" and "compassion meditation". Analysing "one-pointed concentration", I show the differences between novice and expert meditation practitioners in terms of brain activity and connectivity, considering the relationship among increased attention and concentration and decreased activity in areas related to discursive thought and emotion. Analysing "compassion meditation", I show the importance of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. I follow the same strategy of comparing novice and expert meditation practitioners. The conclusion establishes a common structure to those different ways of dealing with emotion during meditation. (shrink)

This “Legal Briefing” column covers recent legal developments involving patient decision aids. This topic has been the subject of recent articles in JCE. It is included in the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And it has received significant attention in the biomedical literature, including a new book, a thematic issue of Health Affairs, and a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Moreover, physicians and health systems across the United States are increasingly integrating decision aids (...) into their clinical practice. Both federal and state laws play a significant role in promoting this expanded use. On the other hand, concerns about liability could stymie development and implementation. We categorize legal developments concerning patient decision aids into the following five sections:1. Development of decision aids2. Effectiveness of decision aids3. Federal regulation of decision aids4. State regulation of decision aids5. Legal concerns regarding decision aids. (shrink)

In recent years, cross-national collaboration in medical research has gained increased policy attention. Policies are developed to enhance data sharing, ensure open-access, and harmonize international standards and ethics rules in order to promote access to existing resources and increase scientific output. In tandem with this promotion of data sharing, numerous ethics policies are developed to control data flows and protect privacy and confidentiality. Both sets of policy making, however, pay limited attention to the moral decisions and social ties (...) enacted in the everyday routines of scientific work. This paper takes its point of departure in the practices of a Danish laboratory with great experience in international collaboration regarding genetic research. We focus on a simple query, what makes genetic material and health data flow, and which hopes and concerns travel along with them? We explore what we call the flows, the nonflows, and the overflows of material and information, and we document the work producing the flows of health data and biomaterial. We call this work “ethics work” and argue that it is crucial for data sharing though it is rarely articulated in ethics policies, remains inadequately funded, and lacks acknowledgment in policies promoting international data sharing. (shrink)

Meditation has been for long time avoided as a scientific theme because of its complexity and its religious connotations. Fortunately, in the last years, it has increasingly been studied within different neuroscientific experimental protocols. Attention and concentration are surely among the most important topics in these experiments. Notwithstanding this, inhibition of emotions and discursive thoughts are equally important to understand what is at stake during those types of mental processes. I philosophically and technically analyse and compare results from neuroimaging (...) studies, produced by leading authorities on the theme, dealing with two types of meditation: "one-pointed concentration" and "compassion meditation". Analysing "one-pointed concentration", I show the differences between novice and expert meditation practitioners in terms of brain activity and connectivity, considering the relationship among increased attention and concentration and decreased activity in areas related to discursive thought and emotion. Analysing "compassion meditation", I show the importance of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. I follow the same strategy of comparing novice and expert meditation practitioners. The conclusion establishes a common structure to those different ways of dealing with emotion during meditation. (shrink)

Attention to the ethical concerns of healthcare aides can provide important information about patients’ needs to careproviders, improve the ethical environment of an institution, and benefit aides who suffer from bearing ethical concerns alone. All persons benefit from sharing their ethical concerns with others. Among other benefits, ethics consultation offers careproviders, caregivers, healthcare aides, patients, and patients’ loved ones an opportunity to have their concerns heard.John Fletcher tried to follow every ethics consultation with a debriefing for all participants, including (...) patients and family members, to increase the possibility for continued healing after the conclusion of the consultation, and there are good reasons to follow this practice. (shrink)

Despite the recent advances in information and communication technology that have increased our ability to store and circulate information, the task of ensuring that the right sorts of information gets to the right sorts of people remains. We argue that the many efforts underway to develop efficient means for sharing information across healthcare systems and organizations would benefit from a careful analysis of human action in healthcare organizations. This in turn requires that the management of information and knowledge within healthcare (...) organizations be combined with models of resources and processes of patient care that are based on a general ontology of social interaction. The Health Level 7 (HL7) is one of several ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organizations operating in the healthcare arena. HL7 has advanced a widely used messaging standard that enables healthcare applications to exchange clinical and administrative data in digital form. HL7 focuses on the interface requirements of the entire healthcare system and not exclusively on the requirements of one area of healthcare such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance transactions. This has inspired the development of a powerful abstract model of patient care called the Reference Information Model (RIM). The present paper begins with an overview of the core classes of the HL7 (Version 3) RIM and a brief discussion of its “actcentered” view of healthcare. Central to this account is what is called the life cycle of events. A clinical action may progress from defined, through planned and ordered, to executed. These modalities of an action are represented as the mood of the act. We then outline the basis of an ontology of organizations, starting from the theory of speech Acts, and apply this ontology to the HL7 RIM. Special attention is given to the sorts of preconditions that must be satisfied for the successful performance of a speech act and to the sorts of entities to which speech acts give rise (e.g. obligations, claims, commitments, etc.). Finally we draw conclusions for the efficient communication and management of medical information and knowledge within and between healthcare organizations, paying special attention to the role that medical documents play in such organizations. (shrink)

In this article, we give much needed attention to the nature and value of corporate prayer by drawing together insights from theology, philosophy, and psychology. First, we explain what it is that distinguishes corporate from private prayer by drawing on the psychological literature on joint attention and the philosophical notion of shared situations. We suggest that what is central to corporate prayer is a “sense of sharedness,” which can be established through a variety of means—through bodily interactions (...) or through certain environments. Second, we argue that corporate prayer, when understood as a kind of shared situation, enables common knowledge, as well as a kind of alignment between participants. Through this process, participants’ attention is focused on the same target and affiliation between participants increases. Thus, we suggest, one benefit of understanding corporate prayer as a shared situation is that it establishes and deepens a sense of community in such a way that common purposes and goals can be enacted more effectively. (shrink)

Phenomena like meat sharing in hunter-gatherers, self-sacrifice in intergroup conflicts, and voluntary contribution to public goods provision in laboratory experiments have led to the development of numerous theories on the evolution of altruistic in-group beneficial behavior in humans. Many of these theories abstract away from the effects of kinship on the incentives for public goods provision, though. Here, it is investigated analytically how genetic relatedness changes the incentive structure of that paradigmatic game which is conventionally used to model and experimentally (...) investigate collective action problems: the linear public goods game. Using recent anthropological data sets on relatedness in 61 contemporary hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies the relevant parameters of this model are then estimated. It turns out that the kinship patterns observed in these societies substantially reduce the negative effect of increasing group size on incentives for public goods provision. It is suggested, therefore, that renewed attention should be given to inclusive fitness theory in the context of public goods provision also in sizable groups, because its explanatory power with respect to this central problem in the evolution of human cooperativeness and altruism might have been substantially underrated. (shrink)

Governing greenwashing in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure is an important issue, but relevant literature is scant. Based on the data on Chinese A-share listed firms from 2012 to 2021, we investigate the governance role of corporate digital transformation (DT) in ESG greenwashing and its influencing mechanism. We find that DT significantly inhibits ESG greenwashing. Moreover, DT mitigates ESG greenwashing by enhancing corporate green technology innovation (i.e., innovation channel), reducing information asymmetry (i.e., information channel), and increasing trade credit (i.e., (...) resource channel). From the perspective of investor attention, we find that both retail investors' online opinions and institutional investors' site visits strengthen the inhibitory effect of DT on ESG greenwashing. Furthermore, such an inhibitory effect is more pronounced in large firms, industries with high competition, and regions with strong intellectual property protection. This research provides new insights and policy suggestions for governing corporate ESG greenwashing behavior. (shrink)

The design and implementation of clinical ethics support is attracting increasing attention. Often, the characteristics and aims of clinical ethics support are translated into practice in a top-down, programmatic manner. These characteristics and aims then remain a constant feature of the clinical ethics support functions within the organisation. We argue that the characteristics of clinical ethics support should be reflected in the implementation strategy. Inspired by dialogical, pragmatic and hermeneutic perspectives on clinical ethics support in general and moral case (...) deliberation in particular, we argue for a dialogical approach to implementing clinical ethics support, based on open, ongoing discussion with healthcare professionals about how they conceive clinical ethics support. Based on research and experience with various moral case deliberation implementation projects in mental healthcare, we present a theoretical framework for dialogical implementation and heuristic guidelines for implementing moral case deliberation in mental healthcare, which take into account the dialogical characteristics of moral case deliberation and some specific features of mental healthcare. (shrink)

It has been suggested that there is a close relationship between visual attention span (VAS) and fluent reading. This relation may be modulated by participants’ age, and exhibits various patterns in different reading modes (i.e. oral v.s. silent reading) and different reading levels (e.g. sentence v.s. character/word levels). Moreover, the modulation effects from the above factors might be more remarkable in the framework of languages with a deep orthography. Therefore, the present study investigated the developmental pattern of the relationship (...) between VAS skills and reading fluency in Chinese, a language with particularly deep orthography, by recruiting 292 participants from primary schools, middle schools and universities. Two tests were utilized to assess fluent reading skills at the single-character and sentence levels with oral and silent reading modes. A visual 1-back task was adopted to reflect VAS capacity with non-verbal stimuli and no verbal response. Results showed that the VAS capacity of low-grade primary school students could significantly account for the variance in single-character reading fluency in the oral mode and that it was a significant predictor of sentence reading fluency in the oral mode among high-grade primary school students. VAS abilities of middle school students allowed a unique and stable prediction of their silent sentence reading. With increasing reading ability, VAS skills of adults showed significant and similar predictive power for estimating the variations in fluent sentence reading in both silent and oral modes. These results revealed developmental changes in the contribution of VAS to fluent reading in Chinese, and provided evidence unveiling whether the underlying mechanisms of oral and silent reading were shared or different. (shrink)

In order to understand what we are talking about when we talk about joint attention, I will scrutinize how the mainstream view that builds on representational and intentionalist theories of mind is constituted. My aim is to show that much of the theory of joint attention is quite narrowly constructed and comes with tacit disciplinary biases that exclude much of what is existentially important in our practices of sharing our perceptions and guiding others to attend to the world (...) in novel ways. By using the frameworks of classical phenomenology and enactivist theories of mind, I aim to show how we, in our interactions, share our perceptions even with beings that are distinctly different from us. And, that this _difference_ in our personal worldview, our cognitive capacities, and our sensory modalities should be seen as a constitutive aspect of our practices of shared attention. I will articulate attention as a revelatory practice that aids us in discovering a shared world through the plurality, rather than similarity, of our perceptual actions. Attention is, in this sense, not solely driven by subjective intentions; it is also formed and co-constituted by my being addressed by the other. (shrink)

A growing number of scholars have suggested that there is a unique I-You relation that obtains between persons in face-to-face encounters, but while the increased attention paid to the second-person has led to many important insights regarding the nature of this relation, there is still much work to be done to clarify what makes the second-person relation distinct. In this paper we wish to develop recent scholarship on the second-person by means of a phenomenological analysis of a doctor-patient interaction. (...) In such an interaction the doctor and patient continuously shift between the observational I-It and the interactive I-You, and recognizing the difference between observation and interaction not only helps to defend the claim that this relation is sui generis, but also uncovers the co-constitution of experience from within this relation. As we argue, engaging another second-personally involves a shared experience that is a result of incorporating the other’s mental states into one’s own while standing in the second-person relation. (shrink)

A growing number of scholars have suggested that there is a unique I-You relation that obtains between persons in face-to-face encounters, but while the increased attention paid to the second-person has led to many important insights regarding the nature of this relation, there is still much work to be done to clarify what makes the second-person relation distinct. In this paper we wish to develop recent scholarship on the second-person by means of a phenomenological analysis of a doctor-patient interaction. (...) In such an interaction the doctor and patient continuously shift between the observational I-It and the interactive I-You, and recognizing the difference between observation and interaction not only helps to defend the claim that this relation is sui generis, but also uncovers the co-constitution of experience from within this relation. As we argue, engaging another second-personally involves a shared experience that is a result of incorporating the other’s mental states into one’s own while standing in the second-person relation. (shrink)

A number of investigators have suggested that affective states influence the focus of attention. One recent proposal is that negative moods increase self-focus. This review considers the evidence that bears on this hypothesis. Conceptual issues pertaining to the construct of self-focus are discussed first. Next, the various parameters that influence attentional focus are presented in order to provide a way of organizing the mood/selffocus literature. Studies that have used state measures of mood and self-focus are considered in (...) this context. Methodological limitations of existing studies are discussed and directions for future work provided. (shrink)

Research on unethical leadership has predominantly focused on interpersonal and high-intensity forms of harmful leader behavior such as abusive supervision. Other forms of harmful leader behavior such as excessively pressuring subordinates or acting in self-centered ways have received less attention, despite being harmful and potentially occurring more frequently. We propose a model of four types of harmful leader behavior varying in intensity and orientation : Intimidation, Lack of Care, Self-Centeredness, and Excessive Pressure for Results. We map out how these (...) relate to other constructs in the unethical leader behavior field in order to integrate the existing work on how leaders can cause harm to followers. Next, in five studies, we develop and test a new survey instrument measuring the four proposed types of perceived HLB. We provide initial validity evidence for this new measure, establish its psychometric properties, and examine its nomological network by linking the four types of HLB to related leadership constructs and soft and hard outcome correlates at the individual and team level. We find that HLB is negatively related to constructive forms of leadership and positively to unethical ones. HLB is also related in the expected direction to job satisfaction, engagement, psychological safety, knowledge sharing, knowledge hiding, deviance, and objectively recorded team-level stress-related absenteeism. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the role of target-target perceptual similarity within the attentional blink. Various geometric shapes were presented in a rapid serial visual presentation task. Targets could have 2, 1, or 0 shared features. Features included shape and size. The second target was presented after five or six different lags after the first target. The task was to detect both targets on each trial. Second-target report accuracy was increased by target-target similarity. This modulation was observed more for mixed-trial design (...) as compared with blocked design. Results are discussed in terms of increased stability of working memory representations and reduced interference for second-target processing. (shrink)

In the current era, building more innovative teams is key to organizational success, yet there is little consensus on how best to achieve this. Common wisdom suggests that positive reinforcement through shared positive rewards builds social support within teams, and in turn facilitates innovation. Research on basic group processes, cultural rituals, and the evolution of pro-group behavior has, however, revealed that sharing adverse experiences is an alternative path to promoting group bonding. Here, we examined whether sharing an adverse experience (...) not only builds social support within teams, but also in turn enhances creativity within novel teams. Drawing on behavioral observation of an experimental group interaction we find evidence that sharing an adverse (vs. non-adverse) experience leads to increased supportive interactions between team members and this in turn boosts creativity within a novel team. These effects were robust across different indicators of creativity: objective measures of creativity, third party ratings of the creativity of group products, and participants’ own perceptions of group creativity. Our findings offer a new perspective from which to understand how best to boost innovation and creative output within teams. (shrink)

Computer and video games have become nearly ubiquitous among individuals in industrialized nations, and they have received increasing attention from researchers across many areas of scientific study. However, relatively little attention has been given to Massively-Multiplayer Online Games . The unique social context of MMOGs raises ethical questions about how communication occurs and how conflict is managed in the game world. In order to explore these questions, we compare the social context in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Disney’s (...) Toontown, focusing on griefing opportunities in each game. We consider ethical questions from the perspectives of players, game companies, and policymakers. (shrink)

Alston's perceptual account of mystical experience fails to show how it is that the sort of predicates that are used to describe God in these experiences could be derived from perception, even though the ascription of matched predicates in the natural order are not derived in the manner Alston has in mind. In contrast, if one looks to research on shared attention between individuals as mediated by mirror neurons, then one can give a perceptual account of mystical experience (...) which draws a tighter connection between what is reported in mystical reports and the most similar reports in the natural order. (shrink)

Alston's perceptual account of mystical experience fails to show how it is that the sort of predicates that are used to describe God in these experiences could be derived from perception, even though the ascription of matched predicates in the natural order are not derived in the manner Alston has in mind. In contrast, if one looks to research on shared attention between individuals as mediated by mirror neurons, then one can give a perceptual account of mystical experience (...) which draws a tighter connection between what is reported in mystical reports and the most similar reports in the natural order. (shrink)

Collective moods are ubiquitous in social life. People may experience the sharing of a mood at a large sporting event, a concert or a religious ceremony, but also at a small family celebration or as part of a tour group. However, in philosophical discussions, collective moods are often framed as experiences of ecstasy, intoxication or even disinhibition at mass events without examining other aspects. Yet we practice and cultivate the sharing of moods in quite varied forms. In this paper (...) I intend to offer a differentiating suggestion as to the levels and forms of the sharing of moods, drawing on discussions of shared feelings, work on the phenomenology of social understanding, and social theory. (shrink)

Mood disorder patients have greater suicide risk than members of the general population, but how suicidal behavior relates to brain functions has not been fully elucidated. This study investigated how functional connectivity (FC) values between the right/left amygdala and the whole brain relate to suicidal behavior in patients with mood disorder. The participants in this study were 100 mood disorder patients with suicidal behavior (SB group), 120 mood disorder patients with non-suicidal behavior (NSB group), and 138 (...) age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC group). Whole-brain FC values among the three groups were compared using an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Compared to the NSB and HC groups, increased FC values in the right amygdala-bilateral paracentral lobule/precuneus circuit were observed in the SB group (Bonferroni-corrected,p 0.017). Moreover, there were no significant differences in FC values between mood disorder patients with suicide attempt (SA group) and mood disorder patients with suicidal ideation (SI group), while the FC values between the right amygdala and bilateral paracentral lobule/precuneus in the SA group were higher than the mean in the SI group. These findings suggest that right amygdala-paracentral lobule/precuneus dysfunction has an important role in patients with mood disorder and suicidal behavior. (shrink)

In a widely cited paper, Jefferies et al.. Emotional valence and arousal interact in attentional control. Psychological Science, 19, 290–295. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02082.x[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]) report a study in which they manipulated participants’ mood and examined the effects of this manipulation on their performance on the Attentional Blink task. Their results revealed an interaction between emotional valence and arousal: attentional control of participants who experienced a negative mood with low arousal was best, whereas it (...) was worst for participants who experienced a negative mood with high arousal. Performance for participants who were in a positive mood, either with low arousal or high arousal had intermediate scores. In this study, I examined the replicability of this effect and performed additional analyses to investigate the extent to which this effect is due to perceptual or attentional processes and to examine the role of distraction on AB performance. Importantly, the results showed that the crucial interaction between emotional valence and arousal did not reach significance. This could be due a diversity of factors that are addressed in the discussion. (shrink)

This study examines two stock market anomalies and provides strong evidence of the day-of-the-week effect in the Chinese A-share market during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we examined the Quality minus Junk strategy return on Monday and FridayQuality stocks mean portfolio deciles that earn higher excess returns. As historical evidences suggest that less distressed/safe stocks earn higher excess returns.. The QMJ factor is similar to the division of speculative and non-speculative stocks described by Birru. Our findings provide evidence that the QMJ (...) strategy gains negative returns on Fridays for both anomalies because the junk side is sensitive to an elevated mood and, thus, performs better than the quality side of portfolios on Friday. Our findings are also consistent with the theory of investor sentiment which asserts that investors are more optimistic when their mood is elevated, and generally individual mood is better on Friday than on other days of the week. Therefore, the speculative stocks earned higher sustainable stock returns during higher volatility in Chinese market due to COVID-19. Intrinsically, new evidence emerges on an inclined strategy to invest in speculative stocks on Fridays during the COVID-19 pandemic to gain sustainable excess returns in the Chinese A-share market. (shrink)