Children ‘born of war’ refer to people of any age conceived as the result of sexual violence at the hands of armed forces or groups during war, displacement, genocide or military occupation. Due to the circumstances of their birth, children ‘born of war’ can experience social stigma, discrimination and exclusion, resulting in diminished life chances and opportunities. At the same time, children ‘born of war’ fall through the cracks of global policy frameworks. In this article, we explore the reasons for (...) this, arguing that the nature of the harm these children endure renders their status as a victim group elusive. We propose a survivor-centred approach drawing on the lived experiences of children ‘born of war’. The approach recognizes the agency of children and draws attention to their expressed desire to contribute to, and participate in, processes of social reconstruction and reconciliation. (shrink)

Peer interaction has been found to be conducive to learning in many settings. Knowledge co-construction has been proposed as one explanatory mechanism. However, KCC is a theoretical construct that is too abstract to guide the development of instructional software that can support peer interaction. In this study, we present an extensive analysis of a corpus of peer dialogs that we collected in the domain of introductory Computer Science. We show that the notion of task initiative shifts correlates with both KCC (...) and learning. Speakers take task initiative when they contribute new content that advances problem solving and that is not invited by their partner; if initiative shifts between the partners, it indicates they both contribute to problem solving. We found that task initiative shifts occur more frequently within KCC episodes than outside. In addition, task initiative shifts within KCC episodes correlate with learning for low pre-testers, and total task initiative shifts correlate with learning for high pre-testers. As recognizing task initiative shifts does not require as much deep knowledge as recognizing KCC, task initiative shifts as an indicator of productive collaboration are potentially easier to model in instructional software that simulates a peer. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study aimed at standardizing and providing preliminary evidence on the clinical usability of the Italian telephone-based Verbal Fluency Battery, which includes phonemic, semantic and alternate verbal fluency tasks.MethodsThree-hundred and thirty-five Italian healthy participants and 27 individuals with neurodegenerative or cerebrovascular diseases were administered the t-VFB. Switch number and cluster size were computed via latent semantic analyses. HPs underwent the telephone-based Mental State Examination and Backward Digit Span. Construct validity, factorial structure, internal consistency, test-retest and inter-rater reliability and equivalence with (...) the in-person Verbal Fluency tasks were assessed. Norms were derived via Equivalent Scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical populations was assessed.ResultsThe majority of t-VFB scores correlated among each other and with the BDS, but not with the MMSE. Switch number correlated with t-PVF, t-SVF, t-AVF scores, whilst cluster size with the t-SVF and t-AVF scores only. The t-VFB was underpinned by a mono-component structure and was internally consistent. Test-retest and inter-rater reliability were optimal. Each t-VFB test was statistically equivalent to its in-person version. Education predicted all t-VFB scores, whereas age t-SVF and t-AVF scores and sex only some t-SVF scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical samples was optimal.DiscussionThe t-VFB is a valid, reliable and normed telephone-based assessment tool for language and executive functioning, equivalent to the in-person version; results show promising evidence of its diagnostic accuracy in neurological populations. (shrink)

Background: COVID-19 has taken many lives worldwide and due to this, millions of persons are in grief. When the grief process lasts longer than 6 months, the person is in risk of developing Complicated Grief Disorder. The CGD is related to serious health consequences. To reduce the probability of developing CGD a preventive intervention could be applied. In developing countries like Mexico, the psychological services are scarce, self-applied interventions could provide support to solve this problem and reduce the health impact (...) even after the pandemic has already finished.Aims: To design and implement a self-applied intervention composed of 12 modules focused on the decrease of the risk of developing CGD, and increasing the life quality, and as a secondary objective to reduce the symptomatology of anxiety, depression, and increase of sleep quality. The Intervention Duelo COVID follows the principles of User Experience and is designed according to the needs and desires of a sample of the objective participants, to increase the adherence to the self-applied intervention, considered one of the main weaknesses of online interventions.Methods: A Randomized Controlled Trial will be conducted from the 22nd of December of 2020 to the first of June 2021. The participants will be assigned to an intervention with elements of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness and Positive Psychology. The control group will be a wait-list condition, that will receive the intervention 1.5–2 months after the pre-measurement were taken. The Power Size Calculation conducted through G*Power indicated the need for a total of 42 participants, which will be divided by 21 participants in each group. The platform will be delivered through responsive design assuring with this that the intervention will adapt to the screen size of cellphones, tablets, and computers.Ethics and Dissemination: The study counts with the approval of the Research Ethics Committee of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, México, and it is registered in Clinical Trials. The article is sent and registered in clinical trials before the recruitment started. The results will be reported in future conferences, scientific publications, and media. (shrink)

Human errors are widely considered among the major causes of road accidents. Furthermore, it is estimated that more than 90% of vehicle crashes causing fatal and permanent injuries are directly related to mental tiredness, fatigue, and drowsiness of the drivers. In particular, driving drowsiness is recognized as a crucial aspect in the context of road safety, since drowsy drivers can suddenly lose control of the car. Moreover, the driving drowsiness episodes mostly appear suddenly without any prior behavioral evidence. The present (...) study aimed at characterizing the onset of drowsiness in car drivers by means of a multimodal neurophysiological approach to develop a synthetic electroencephalographic -based index, able to detect drowsy events. The study involved 19 participants in a simulated scenario structured in a sequence of driving tasks under different situations and traffic conditions. The experimental conditions were designed to induce prominent mental drowsiness in the final part. The EEG-based index, so-called “MDrow index”, was developed and validated to detect the driving drowsiness of the participants. The MDrow index was derived from the Global Field Power calculated in the Alpha EEG frequency band over the parietal brain sites. The results demonstrated the reliability of the proposed MDrow index in detecting the driving drowsiness experienced by the participants, resulting also more sensitive and timely sensible with respect to more conventional autonomic parameters, such as the EyeBlinks Rate and the Heart Rate Variability, and to subjective measurements. (shrink)

In the international context of a progress toward more inclusive educational systems and practices, the role of Special Education teachers is being transformed. From an inclusive perspective, these professionals increasingly support students and their teachers in the mainstream classroom, avoiding segregation. However, Special Education teachers often struggle to reach and support all students with special needs and their teachers to provide quality inclusive education. For this reason, more research is still needed on in-service training strategies for the inclusion of students (...) with special needs that effectively translate into evidence-based school practices that improve the education of all students. This article analyses the impact of two evidence-based dialogic training programs of Special Education teachers working in mainstream schools carried out in Mexico during the 2018–2019 school year. Through in-depth interviews with participants, it was identified how, after the training, teachers increasingly grounded their actions on scientific evidence and promoted interactive learning environments that improved the educational inclusion of their students with special needs. This training also became the venue to make evidence-based educational actions available to other students without special needs, improving the quality of education provided to all students. (shrink)

We revisit the sequential search problem by Hey. In a 2 ×\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\times $$\end{document} 2 factorial design, varying fixed and random cost treatments with and without recall, we address open research questions that were originally stated by Hey. Our results provide clear evidence for Hey’s conjecture that recall negatively affects performance in sequential search. With experience, however, search behavior with and without recall converges toward the optimal reservation rule. We further find that (...) the utilization of optimal reservation rules is independent from the stochastic nature of the search cost. (shrink)

Technologies like passive brain-computer interfaces can enhance human-machine interaction. Anyhow, there are still shortcomings in terms of easiness of use, reliability, and generalizability that prevent passive-BCI from entering real-life situations. The current work aimed to technologically and methodologically design a new gel-free passive-BCI system for out-of-the-lab employment. The choice of the water-based electrodes and the design of a new lightweight headset met the need for easy-to-wear, comfortable, and highly acceptable technology. The proposed system showed high reliability in both laboratory and (...) realistic settings, performing not significantly different from the gold standard based on gel electrodes. In both cases, the proposed system allowed effective discrimination between low and high levels of workload, vigilance, and stress even for high temporal resolution. Finally, the generalizability of the proposed system has been tested through a cross-task calibration. The system calibrated with the data recorded during the laboratory tasks was able to discriminate the targeted human factors during the realistic task reaching AUC values higher than 0.8 at 40 s of temporal resolution in case of vigilance and workload, and 20 s of temporal resolution for the stress monitoring. These results pave the way for ecologic use of the system, where calibration data of the realistic task are difficult to obtain. (shrink)

Questo saggio esplora la critica a Marx e al “marxismo” sviluppata da Simone Weil nel corso della sua opera. Vengono identificati tre nuclei principali della critica weiliana al marxismo: la validità del metodo materialistico per lo studio delle scienze sociali; il presunto “messianesimo” di Marx, inteso come la concezione della storia come un progresso intelligente verso il meglio; e l’identificazione del marxismo tout court con una filosofia determinista e meccanicista. Si cerca di definire a quale “Marx” effettivamente sia rivolta la (...) critica di Weil: si sostiene infatti che alcune delle sue argomentazioni siano riferibili alla “vulgata” marxiana, ossia a una lettura semplificata e schematica del marxismo, o alla “tendenza deteriore” del marxismo caratterizzata dall’economicismo e dal meccanicismo, dibattuta anche all’interno della Seconda Internazionale, o a posizioni di Engels e Lenin, o ancora all’operato del PCF o delle organizzazioni operaie, piuttosto che all’effettiva opera di Marx. (shrink)

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a popular method for examining real-life decision-making. Research has shown gender related differences in performance, in that men consistently outperform women. It has been suggested that these performance differences are related to decreased emotional control in women compared to men. Given the likely role of emotion in these gender differences, in the present study we examine the effect of a humor induction on IGT performance and whether the effect of humor is moderated by gender. (...) IGT performance and parameters from the Expectancy Valence Model were measured in 68 university students (34 men; mean age 22.02, SD = 4.3 and 34 women; mean age 22.3, SD = 4.1) during a 100 trial-IGT task. Participants were exposed to a brief video before each of the IGT decisions available; one half of the sample (17 men and 17 women) was exposed to 100 humor videos, while the other half was exposed to 100 non-humor videos during the task. We observed a significant interaction between gender and humor, such that under humor, women’s performance during the last block (trials 80-100) improved (compared to women under non-humor), whereas men’s performance during the last block was worse (compared to men under non-humor). Consistent with previous work, under non-humor, men outperformed women in the last block. Lastly, our EVM results show that humor impacts the learning mechanisms of decision-making differently in men and women. Humor impaired men’s ability to acquire knowledge about the payoff structure of the decks, and as a consequence they were stuck in suboptimal performance. On the other hand, humor facilitated women’s ability to explore and to learn from experience, improving performance. These findings deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying IGT decision-making and differential effects of humor in men and women. (shrink)

Introduzione Nel codice della sua Bibliotheca consacrato a recensire la produzione letteraria di Temistio, il patriarca Fozio testimonia di aver letto – oltre ad alcune opere filosofiche – un corpus di trentasei discorsi politici (λόγοι πολιτιϰοιλς), tra cui alcuni indirizzati a Costanzo, a Valente e Valentiniano II, a Teodosio, non tutti pervenuti. Ora, l'opera oratoria di Temistio, quale noi moderni leggiamo, comprende trentatrè orazioni, pubbliche e private, di cui due (o forse tre) incomplete. È molto probabile che gli altri tre (...) discorsi che Fozio ugualmente leggeva siano da identificare con orazioni perdute, di cui sopravvivono talune notizie: il discorso recitato nel 357 dinanzi al senato di Costantinopoli in occasione di un'ambasceria a Roma, il panegirico indirizzato nel 363 all'imperatore Giuliano per il suo quarto consolato e l'orazione sulla tolleranza religiosa indirizzata a Valente tra gli anni 375–376. Verrebbe, in questo modo, confermata la notizia della Bibliotheca circa l'esistenza di un corpus di complessivi trentasei discorsi ed in particolare rafforzata l'ipotesi, ventilata da taluni studiosi, secondo cui la silloge temistiana in nostro possesso corrisponderebbe in buona sostanza al ‘libro’ recensito da Fozio. (shrink)

Selective attention depends on goal-directed and stimulus-driven modulatory factors, each relayed by different brain rhythms. Under certain circumstances, stress-related states can change the balance between goal-directed and stimulus-driven factors. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear. In this study, we explored how psychosocial stress can modulate brain rhythms during an attentional task and a task-free period. We recorded the EEG and ECG activity of 42 healthy participants subjected to either the Trier Social Stress Test, a controlled procedure to (...) induce stress, or a comparable control protocol, flanked by an attentional task, a 90 s of task-free period and a state of anxiety questionnaire. We observed that psychosocial stress induced an increase in heart rate, self-reported anxiety, and alpha power synchronization. Also, psychosocial stress evoked a relative beta power increase during correct trials of the attentional task, which correlates positively with anxiety and heart rate increase, and inversely with attentional accuracy. These results suggest that psychosocial stress affects performance by redirecting attentional resources toward internal threat-related thoughts. An increment of endogenous top-down modulation reflected an increased beta-band activity that may serve as a compensatory mechanism to redirect attentional resources toward the ongoing task. The data obtained here may contribute to designing new ways of clinical management of the human stress response in the future and could help to minimize the damaging effects of persistent stressful experiences. (shrink)

The article fits in the new investigation trend about the classical models and sources of the Philagathos of Cerami’s Homilies, with particular focus on anonymous quotations and imitations of the Procopius of Gaza’s sophistic and rhetorical work. One of the most signifiant examples is the description of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo , for which Philagathos bore certainly in mind and adapted, besides other works, the Procopius’s Descriptio horologii. The conclusion is that Philagathos had at his disposal a whole now (...) lost manuscript with the Procopius’s work. (shrink)

La rinascita negli ultimi decenni di un nutrito dibattito intorno alla nozione di analiticità dopo le critiche a suo tempo mosse da Quine alla batteria di nozioni utilizzate da Rudolf Carnap (ad esempio, postulati di significato, regole semantiche, definizioni implicite, convenzioni e stipulazioni esplicite) prende le mosse da una riflessione critica sulle argomentazioni di Quine e tenta, da un lato, di approfondire meglio il legame fra analiticità e conoscenza a priori, e, dall’altro, di capire meglio il ruolo che la definizione (...) può svolgere nella costituzione del significato e nella formulazione di verità concettuali. Questa nuova concezione è detta “epistemica” ed ha fra i suoi più autorevoli fautori Crispin Wright, Bob Hale e Paul Boghossian. Boghossian, al pari di molti filosofi critici della nuova concezione epistemica, come Timothy Williamson, conviene però con Quine nel sostenere che gli enunciati analitici hanno portata fattuale e vertono anch’essi sul mondo, oltre che sul linguaggio. Anche per questa ragione essi possono rendere possibile una genuina estensione delle nostre conoscenze. Tuttavia una seconda linea di obiezioni facenti capo dapprima a Paul Horwich, e in seguito agli stessi Wright e Hale, mette in evidenza rispettivamente due difficoltà corrispondenti alle questioni dell’arroganza e dell’accettazione. In questa discussione una parte importante è svolta dalla ripresa e della discussione del condizionale di Carnap, impiegato per rendere conto del ruolo che i termini teorici svolgono nel quadro dell’intera teoria cui appartengono, senza con ciò sposare le conseguenze dell’olismo quineano. La tesi centrale che questo lavoro cerca di rendere plausibile è che una lettura attenta degli ultimi scritti di Carnap mostri come il carattere aperto che egli attribuisce ai termini teorici in ragione, sia dello loro intrinseca indeterminatezza, sia delle revisioni imposte dalle scoperte scientifiche, è perfettamente compatibile con la fattorizzazione del contenuto di una teoria scientifica data in una parte linguistica, il condizionale di Carnap, riguardante la costituzione del significato di un certo termine teorico, e nella sua controparte empirica, che consente di registrare l’impatto dell’esperienza sulla teoria in questione. Se praticabile, questa concezione può a buon diritto entrare nel novero delle teorie epistemiche dell’analiticità, senza accampare alcuna pretesa di far rivivere i fasti della conoscenza a priori classica. (shrink)

Contro una visione prettamente strumentale della razionalità, una tesi di questo libro è che il pensiero critico non può consistere solo di abilità di pensiero deduttivo o inferenziale, ma è più in generale espressione di abilità epistemiche e competenze etiche inerenti al processo della conoscenza intesa come questione complessa, poiché relativa alla formazione della persona che conosce e agisce nel mondo secondo determinati fini, valori, credenze. Una valutazione delle competenze che non tenga conto di questa differenza genera forme di ingiustizia (...) epistemica. La proposta di questo lavoro –– alla luce di alcune riflessioni su varie tendenze dell’epistemologia contemporanea –– è pertanto che il pensiero critico nasce essenzialmente da un processo di trasmissione dell’eredità culturale e va di pari passo con una didattica guidata. Il linguaggio rappresenta un bagaglio storico, olistico e sociale della tradizione delle ragioni e delle forme di vita che costituiscono le norme o il mezzo in base ai quali gli educatori mediano la loro interpretazione di colui che apprende e lo ammettono all’interno dello spazio delle ragioni. Il passaggio è così da una concezione improntata alla formazione di abilità volte alla ricerca di una verità oggettiva, all’idea che l’approccio critico, pur senza negare una verità oggettiva, e senza ricadere in una soluzione relativista, presuppone piuttosto un punto di vista prospettico sulla realtà. (shrink)

Introduzione Nel codice della sua Bibliotheca consacrato a recensire la produzione letteraria di Temistio, il patriarca Fozio testimonia di aver letto – oltre ad alcune opere filosofiche – un corpus di trentasei discorsi politici (λόγοι πολιτιϰοιλς), tra cui alcuni indirizzati a Costanzo, a Valente e Valentiniano II, a Teodosio, non tutti pervenuti. Ora, l'opera oratoria di Temistio, quale noi moderni leggiamo, comprende trentatrè orazioni, pubbliche e private, di cui due (o forse tre) incomplete. È molto probabile che gli altri tre (...) discorsi che Fozio ugualmente leggeva siano da identificare con orazioni perdute, di cui sopravvivono talune notizie: il discorso recitato nel 357 dinanzi al senato di Costantinopoli in occasione di un'ambasceria a Roma, il panegirico indirizzato nel 363 all'imperatore Giuliano per il suo quarto consolato e l'orazione sulla tolleranza religiosa indirizzata a Valente tra gli anni 375–376. Verrebbe, in questo modo, confermata la notizia della Bibliotheca circa l'esistenza di un corpus di complessivi trentasei discorsi ed in particolare rafforzata l'ipotesi, ventilata da taluni studiosi, secondo cui la silloge temistiana in nostro possesso corrisponderebbe in buona sostanza al ‘libro’ recensito da Fozio. (shrink)