The emotion of anger, when chronic, is especially problematic. Frequent and intense experiences of anger predict quite a few adverse health outcomes and are especially implicated in cardiovascular...

Self-deception is an important construct in social, personality, and clinical literatures. Although historical and clinical views of self-deception have regarded it as defensive in nature and operation, modern views of this individual difference variable instead highlight its apparent benefits to subjective mental health. The present four studies reinforce the latter view by showing that self-deception predicts positive priming effects, but not negative priming effects, in reaction time tasks sensitive to individual differences in affective priming. In all studies, individuals higher in (...) self-deception displayed stronger positive priming effects, defined in terms of facilitation with two positive stimuli in a consecutive sequence, but self-deception did not predict negative priming effects in the same tasks. Importantly, these effects occurred both in tasks that called for the retrieval of self-knowledge (Study 1) and those that did not (Studies 2–4). This broad pattern supports substantive views of self-deception rather than views narrowly focused on self-presentation processes. Implications for understanding self-deception are discussed. (shrink)

Approach and avoidance motivation may represent important explanatory constructs in understanding how individuals differ. Such constructs have primarily been assessed in self-reported terms, but there are limitations to self-reports of motivation. Accordingly, the present review concentrates on the potential utility of implicit cognitive-behavioral probes of approach and avoidance motivation in modeling and understanding individual differences. The review summarizes multiple lines of research that have documented the utility of such probes to the personality-processing interface. Although multiple gaps in our knowledge exist, (...) and are acknowledged, the value of such implicit cognitive-behavioral assessments is emphasized both in modeling multiple subcomponents of approach and avoidance motivation and in showing that such tendencies matter in ways that transcend momentary experiences or manipulations. (shrink)

Mindfulness, defined in terms of greater attention and awareness concerning present experience, seems to have a number of psychological benefits, but very little of this research has focused on possible benefits within the workplace. Even so, mindfulness appears to buffer against stress and negative affect, which often predispose employees to deviant behaviors. Conversely, mindful employees may be more engaged with their jobs, which could support organizational citizenship. Two studies pursued these ideas. In Study 1, part-time employees who were higher in (...) dispositional mindfulness were less prone to job negative affect, which in turn predicted lower levels of workplace deviance. In Study 2, more mindful full-time employees were more engaged, and less stressed, and these variables mediated a portion of the relationship between mindfulness and organizational citizenship. Collectively, the two studies link mindfulness to both traditional forms of voluntary work behavior while highlighting mediational pathways. (shrink)

The Storms of Providence surveys and critiques Calvinism, Arminianism, and Open Theism as models of the divine-world relationship. Further, the book defends a modified version of traditional Arminianism. The author contends that the most theologically and philosophically sound model of the divine-world relationship is one that affirms that human actions are free and not divinely determined, even while asserting that God has complete knowledge of the future.

ABSTRACTNegative feedback has paradoxical features to it. This form of feedback can have informational value under some circumstances, but it can also threaten the ego, potentially upsetting behaviour as a result. To investigate possible consequences of the latter type, two experiments presented positive or negative feedback within a sequence-prediction task that could not be solved. Following feedback, participants had to control their behaviours as effectively as possible in a motor control task. Relative to positive feedback, negative feedback undermined control in (...) a manner suggesting emotional upset. These reactions lasted for at least three seconds and were especially pronounced among people reporting that they typically lose control in the context of their negative emotions. The findings document a novel form of behavioural dysregulation that occurs in response to negative feedback while also highlighting the utility of motor control perspectives on self... (shrink)

The article describes a capstone engineering course for preservice and inservice secondary science and mathematics teachers and shows teacher attitudes toward engineering before and after the course and results of a comparison with a convenience sample. It also gives the results of the attitudes of high school student experimental and control groups toward engineering in a pretest-posttest design. Four findings were made: (a) The science and mathematics preservice and inservice teacher attitudes toward engineering became more favorable after the capstone course; (...) (b) the attitudes of the convenience sample of secondary graduate students were less favorable toward engineering than they were among the treatment group in the capstone course; (c) the attitudes of the experimental group of high school students became significantly more favorable toward engineering after a 3-week unit on engineering; and (d) the attitudes of the experimental group became significantly more favorable toward engineering than did those of the control group after the 3-week unit. (shrink)

We applaud the goals and execution of the target article, but note that individual differences do not receive much attention. This is a shortcoming because individual differences can play a vital role in theory testing. In our commentary, we describe programs of research of this type and also apply similar thinking to the mechanisms proposed in the target article.

ABSTRACTMetaphors frequently link negative affect with darkness and associations of this type have been established in several experimental paradigms. Given the ubiquity and strength of these associations, people who prefer dark to light may be more prone to negative emotional experiences and symptoms. A five study investigation couches these ideas in a new theoretical framework and then examines them. Across studies, 1 in 4 people preferred the perceptual concept of dark over the perceptual concept of light. These dark-preferring people scored (...) higher in neuroticism and experienced greater depressive feelings in daily life. Moreover, dark preferences shared a robust relationship with depressive symptoms as well as generalised anxiety symptoms. The results provide novel insights into negative affectivity and extend conceptual metaphor theory in a way that is capable of making individual difference predictions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Philosophers Trivialize Art: Bleak House, Oedipus Rex, "Leda and the Swan"Michael D. HurleyIIt is a Perverse but unsurprising irony that answers to the question of whether art can give us knowledge characteristically trivialize that which draws us to individual artworks in the first place. The experience of art is sidelined in favor of the apparent after-effect of that experience. Even those writing against each other tend to (...) converge on this. In an essay contesting Nelson Goodman's epistemic claims for art, Gordon Graham nonetheless agrees that, "The question to be asked of such a work is not, 'Does this effectively capture the scene portrayed?', but 'Does this make us see this sort of occasion differently?'"1 Even attempts to distinguish art as "gift" as opposed to commodity predictably figure its value in terms of what might be taken away: "I went to see a landscape painter's works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and the colors I had not seen the day before."2This state of affairs is perversely ironic for two reasons. Firstly, because the possibility of art's cognitive content is only prompted at all by the immediate experience it offers: without this, art would not excite us the way it does and there would be no debate to be had. Secondly, and more significantly, because a defining part of what constitutes an interest in art is, I should like to suggest, an experience of knowledge; or, more accurately, an experience of knowing. This irony is unsurprising because it is merely another expression of a recalcitrant prejudice in western epistemology that idealizes knowledge as an objectively true, justified belief—perforce excluding the possibility of knowing as a subjective [End Page 107] experience of believing. No wonder the author of Theætetus elsewhere finds poets incapable of offering anything but lies.Plato's lingering legacy assures that the cognitive content of art be assized according to what might be extracted from the artwork—cashed in like so many casino chips—when we are done with our experience of it. This applies whether the knowledge-bearing being argued for, or against, is conceptual or propositional (e.g., Putnam, Novitz, John),3 or imaginative (e.g., Goodman, Robinson, Currie),4 as well as for the claim that art can offer us moral instruction (e.g., Beardsmore, Eldridge, Nussbaum, Sharpe, Kieran, John).5 There is less consensus as to whether the capacity of art to give us knowledge enriches the aesthetic value of that artwork, but those who would advance this position have been on the back-foot in recent years following a wave of criticisms from, among others, Beardsley, Lamarque and Olsen, Diffey, and Gaut.6This article addresses art's capacity to give us knowledge as well as the conjunct of whether such knowledge might inform its value qua art. In so doing, it presses a case that has already been disallowed by the terms in which the question of the relationship between art and knowledge is typically put. Whatever efferent knowledge art might offer, it also provides the conditions for a kind of knowing that cannot be translated beyond itself. Only such an experience of knowledge-as-knowing, which is realized through the untranslatable singularity of an artwork, may be considered constitutive of art's aesthetic value. Couched another way: epistemology meets aesthetics not where it has most often been located, in the perfective, at the congruence of the thought and the felt, but in the present continuous, in the engagement of thinking and feeling. Connecting the epistemic and the aesthetic in this way is, then, exactly the opposite proposition to that presented by Douglas Morgan, for whom, "although many words in many arts can and do give us knowledge of many kinds, nonetheless if this knowledge were the key and limit to the love of art, the world of art would be even sorrier than it now is."7IILiterature has generated by far the greatest volume of commentary in the debate on art and knowledge. This is to be expected given the bias towards categorizing knowledge as something like data... (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

In The Right and the Good, W. D. Ross commits himself to the view that, in addition to being distinct and defeasible, some prima facie duties are more binding than others. David McNaughton has argued that there appears to be no way of making sense of this claim that is both coherent and consistent with Ross's overall picture. I offer an alternative way of understanding Ross's remarks about the comparative stringency of prima facie duties, which, in addition to being compatible (...) with his view as presented in the text, provides us with a coherent, and indeed plausible, account of what it means for some duties to be more binding than others. (shrink)

Research in ethical decision making has consistently demonstrated a positive relationship between others’ unethical behavior and observers’ unethical behavior, providing support for the “Monkey See, Monkey Do” perspective (e.g., Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly, Acad Manage J 41:658–672, 1998 ). However, the boundaries of this relationship have received little research attention. Guided by theory and research in interpersonal distancing, we explore these boundaries by proposing and examining “moral differentiation,” the set of individual and situational characteristics that affect the degree to which (...) one is willing to be influenced by others’ unethical behavior. Using data from 655 undergraduate business students in two U.S. universities, we test moderating hypotheses regarding the influence of moral differentiation characteristics on the relationship between others’ unethical behavior and observers’ unethical behavior. Results suggest that strong moral identity, low need for affiliation, and extraversion weaken the relationship between others’ unethical behavior and observers’ unethical behavior. Implications for managers and future research are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Phyllis Rooney’s 2003 chapter, “Feminist Epistemology and Naturalized Epistemology: An Uneasy Alliance,” taking guidance from her critique of naturalized epistemology in pursuing my own analysis of another uneasy alliance: that between feminist epistemology and social epistemology. Investigating some of the background assumptions at work in prominent conceptions of social epistemology, I consider recent analyses of "epistemic bubbles" to ask how closely such analyses are aligned with ongoing research in feminist epistemology. I argue that critical feminist (...) insights in political philosophy are called for here, especially those that focus on multiple politically salient relationships and also emphasize practices of personal transformation as inseparably bound up with broader movements for social transformation. Insofar as feminist epistemology continues to carry another world in its heart, I argue that it will continue to rest uneasily with any effort to align it with—let alone subsume it within—the still emerging field of social epistemology. (shrink)

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the (...) first, functioned as a secular religion. Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. (shrink)

The evidence is overwhelming that members of particularly wealthy and industry-owning segments of Western societies have much larger carbon footprints than most other humans, and thereby contribute far more than their “fair share” to the enormous problem of climate change. Nonetheless, in this paper we shall counsel against a strategy focused primarily on blaming and shaming and propose, instead, a change in the ethical conversation about climate change. We recommend a shift in the ethical framework from a focus on the (...) role of individual agents and a conversation about guilt; in its place, we propose a relational approach to public health ethics that is centered around the idea of relational solidarity. We begin by briefly reviewing the most common—and woefully inadequate—approach in the West to reducing emissions and responding to the health-related impacts of climate change. We then go on to propose a relational approach to public health ethics as an alternative ethical framework that better fits the moral problems associated with climate change and holds promise for a more meaningful response. (shrink)

Verbs of mental states or activity constitute a subject of considerable interest to both Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Typology. They promise to open a window on the invisible workings of the mind, while at the same time displaying a wide variety of historical sources across languages. In this book Michael Fortescue presents an innovative approach to the semantics and diachronic source of cognitive verbs across a representative array of the world's languages. The relationship among the cognitive verbs of individual (...) languages is essentially one of metonymy, and the book investigates in detail the specific metonymic relationships involved, as revealed largely by the polysemous spread of word meanings. The data is projected against a circular 'map' of interrelated cognitive categories. (shrink)

If one were to prioritise the most important contributions of John Wesley, within that list would be the contribution of his Doctrine of Christian Perfection. The development of this doctrine was a life-long project for Wesley, who always held the core belief that the telos of perfection was love for God and one's neighbour. Wesley's Doctrine of Christian Perfection found its most comprehensive outline in his 1743 manuscript, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. This article will argue that Wesley's ethics, (...) as found in his teaching and the work of the Methodist movement, are built on the view that the life of the Christian should be a journey of an ever-growing love for God and love for neighbour. This article will explore Thoughts upon Slavery as a critical text in the Wesley corpus to see how the Doctrine of Christian Perfection influenced Wesley's thoughts on slavery. Finally, this article offers a way of doing Wesleyan ethics today. Wesleyan ethics are communally understood in that all holiness is social holiness, and Wesleyan ethics have as their primary concern Wesley's charge to do no harm, do good, and stay in love with God. (shrink)

Unferth the troublesome þyle, the spokesman of King Hrothgar at Heorot, has seldom rested easily in the annals of Beowulf scholarship. Disputes about his behavior and character were already dividing scholars in the nineteenth century, and the last generation has seen a flurry of conflicting analyses. James Rosier, for example, viewed him as a quarrelsome braggart, Norman Eliason as a “mere jester” and perhaps also scop, and Fred Robinson as a “blustering mean-spirited coward.” Other critics contest virtually every aspect (...) of those readings. More recently, R. D. Fulk in an impressively learned paper has furthered our understanding by showing that Unferth's name does not mean “mar-peace” or “Hun-spirited” but is an authentically early Germanic name and not an allegorical coinage of later Anglo-Saxon times. In the wake of that demonstration, more scholars have tended to endorse a rather positive assessment of Unferth, seeing him as “part of the heroic world's gritty reality” in which a good flyting did not necessarily mean earnest enmity. He may be a “dull foil,” but he is also an honorable, if flawed, man, a leading warrior in Hrothgar's comitatus, and, more certainly now, a “speaker” or “privileged spokesman” for the king. (shrink)

Public philosophy is diverse in orientation, methodology, and practice. This chapter addresses challenges to supporting and sustaining public philosophy initiatives as professional philosophers. It also addresses institutional challenges that public philosophers face as they develop, lead, and expand public‐facing projects. Many of us discovered philosophy through a public philosophy program or resource, in a K–12 classroom, or through the philosophically minded mentorship of someone who took our questioning seriously. Far from a supererogatory good, public engagement is necessary for sustaining the (...) practice of philosophy both inside and outside the academy. The chapter considers strategies for sustaining public philosophy in and beyond the academy. It focuses on two key areas: reframing evaluation and organizational collaboration. (shrink)

Methods of ethical reasoning in psychiatry -- Psychiatric professional ethics and the social -- Communitarian ethics and the social -- Moral agency in psychiatry -- Involuntary psychiatric treatment -- Psychiatry across cultures -- Neoliberalism -- Psychiatry and popular culture -- Psychiatric ethics in the light of neuroscience -- Reappraisals -- Power and knowledge in psychiatry.

The subject matter of this book is the mental lexicon, that is, the way in which the form and meaning of words is stored by speakers of specific languages. This book attempts to narrow the gap between the results of experimental neurology and the concerns of theoretical linguistics in the area of lexical semantics. The prime goal as regards linguistic theory is to show how matters of lexical organization can be analysed and discussed within a neurologically informed framework that is (...) both adaptable and constrained. It combines the perspectives of distributed network modelling and linguistic semantics, and draws upon the accruing evidence from neuroimaging studies as regards the cortical regions involved. It engages with a number of controversial current issues in both disciplines. The book is intended as a tool for linguists interested in psychological adequacy and the latest advances in cognitive science. It provides a principled means of distinguishing those semantic features required by a mental lexicon that have a direct bearing on grammar from those that do not. It will appeal to researchers in neurolinguistics and lexical semantics."--p. 4 of cover. (shrink)

On May 16, 2012, RAND brought together a group of public company directors and executives, chief ethics and compliance officers, and stakeholders from the government, academic, and nonprofit sectors for a series of conversations about organizational culture, as well as to explore the business and policy ramifications of efforts to build better ethical cultures in corporations.

The main thesis of this book is that abstraction, far from being confined to higher forms of cognition, language and logical reasoning, has actually been a major driving force throughout the evolution of creatures with brains. It is manifest in emotive as well as rational thought. Wending its way through the various facets of abstraction, the book attempts to clarify - and relate - the often confusing meanings of the word 'abstract' that one may encounter even within the same discipline. (...) The unusual synoptic approach, which draws upon research in psychology, neural network theory, child language acquisition, philosophy and consciousness studies, as well as a variety of linguistic disciplines, cannot be compared directly to other books on the market that touch upon just one particular aspect of abstraction. It is aimed at a wide readership - anyone interested in the nature of abstraction and the cognitive processing and purpose behind it. (shrink)

Michael Potter presents a comprehensive new philosophical introduction to set theory. Anyone wishing to work on the logical foundations of mathematics must understand set theory, which lies at its heart. Potter offers a thorough account of cardinal and ordinal arithmetic, and the various axiom candidates. He discusses in detail the project of set-theoretic reduction, which aims to interpret the rest of mathematics in terms of set theory. The key question here is how to deal with the paradoxes that bedevil (...) set theory. Potter offers a strikingly simple version of the most widely accepted response to the paradoxes, which classifies sets by means of a hierarchy of levels. What makes the book unique is that it interweaves a careful presentation of the technical material with a penetrating philosophical critique. Potter does not merely expound the theory dogmatically but at every stage discusses in detail the reasons that can be offered for believing it to be true. Set Theory and its Philosophy is a key text for philosophy, mathematical logic, and computer science. (shrink)

These new studies of Wittgenstein's Tractatus represent a significant step beyond recent polemical debate.