This paper analyses Cartesian ethics and politics. It defends that Descartes's position in these areas coincides with his metaphysical and physical conceptions, searching a difficult equilibrium between individualism and altruism, quiet life and social commitment.

This paper analyses Cartesian ethics and politics. It defends that Descartes's position in these areas coincides with his metaphysical and physical conceptions, searching a difficult equilibrium between individualism and altruism, quiet life and social commitment.

The development of empathy is central to positive social adjustment. However, issues remain with integrating empathy research conducted with children, adolescents, and adults. The current article (...

El proceso educativo sufrió un drástico cambio debido a la pandemia que padecimos a nivel mundial, tuvimos que aprender a usar las herramientas tecnológicas en la enseñanza y en el aprendizaje. Por lo que siguiendo esta tendencia planteamos la utilización de la aplicación “Física M-Lab” en su primera versión para la enseñanza de la cinemática.Como estamos en el campo de las ciencias sociales, utilizamos el diseño cuasiexperimental que nos permitió concluir en que los aprendizajes mejoraron significativamente.

The critical discourse analysis is the tool used in this article, to study how audiovisual media have constructed mental representation about the historical facts occurred in Spain between the final stage of the Spanish Civil War and the late 1980s: the theft of newborn babies. The State has failed in an attempt to establish policies that support truth, justice and reparation as it has been recalled by United Nations experts to the Government of Spain, and the reports and documentaries have (...) become vehicles to capture and recover memories. Our objective is to analyze how this collective awareness has been realized and the contribution of reports and documentaries. Our results show that the Spanish television channels silence the Francoist context to depict the thefts as the product of economical mobs focused on child trafficking. The international channels, however, put the origin of the dictatorship at the center of the discourse. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

Pathogenic bacteria frequently target the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and mitochondria in order to exploit host functions. ER‐mitochondria inter‐organelle communication is topologically sub‐compartmentalized at mitochondria‐associated ER membranes (MAMs). MAMs are specific membranous microdomains with unique regulatory functions such as lipid synthesis and trafficking, calcium homeostasis, mitochondrial morphology, inflammasome activation, autophagosome formation, and apoptosis. These important cellular processes are all modulated by pathogens to subvert host functions and promote infection, thus it is tempting to assume that pathogenic bacteria target MAMs to subvert (...) these different pathways in their hosts. First lines of evidence that support this hypothesis come from Legionella pneumophila. This intracellular bacterium secretes an effector that exhibits sphingosine‐1 phosphate lyase activity (LpSpl) that seems to target MAMs to modulate the autophagy response to infection. Here we thus propose the concept that MAMs could be targeted by pathogenic bacteria to undermine key host cellular processes. (shrink)

Si on analyse le concept de vie dans la seconde version de L'amour et dans L'esprit du christianisme, on voit s'amorcer une métaphysique de l'amour comme synthèse et suprême manifestation de la vie ; mais l'amour y représente une élévation sur les niveaux de la loi et une réflexion d'ordre éthique et religieux. On y trouve également une réflexion sur les rapports de l'amour avec la « belle religion » par rapport à l'unité de la vie. Dans L'esprit du christianisme, (...) la vie apparaît comme un principe plus élevé que l'amour. If one analyzes the concept of life in Hegel's second version of Love and in The Spirit of Christianity one witnesses the surge of a metaphysics of love as synthesis and supreme manifestation of life ; but love also represents in this text a higher level above law and a new pondering of an ethical and religous order. One can also find a new approach on the relationships between love and the « beautiful religion » as linked with the unity of life. In The Spirit of Christianity, life appears as a higher principle than love. (shrink)

Robots are increasingly envisaged as our future cohabitants. However, while considerable progress has been made in recent years in terms of their technological realization, the ability of robots to inter-act with humans in an intuitive and social way is still quite limited. An important challenge for social robotics is to determine how to design robots that can perceive the user’s needs, feelings, and intentions, and adapt to users over a broad range of cognitive abilities. It is conceivable that if robots (...) were able to adequately demonstrate this, humans would eventually accept them as social companions. We argue that the best way to achieve this is using a systematic experimental approach based on behavioral and physiological neuroscience methods such as motion/eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), or functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) embedded in interactive human-robot paradigms. This approach requires understanding how humans interact with each other, how they perform tasks together and how they develop feelings of social connection over time, and using these insights to formulate design principles that make social robots attuned to the workings of the human brain. In this review, we put forward the argument that the likelihood of artificial agents being perceived as social companions can be increased by designing them in a way that they are perceived as intentional agents that activate areas in the human brain involved in social-cognitive processing. We first review literature related to social-cognitive mechanisms involved in human-human interactions, and high-light the importance of perceiving others as intentional agents to activate these brain areas. We then discuss how attribution of intentionality can positively affect human-robot interaction by (a) fostering feelings of social connection, empathy and prosociality, and by (b) enhancing performance on joint human-robot tasks. Lastly, we describe circumstances under which attribution of intentionality to robot agents might be disadvantageous, and discuss challenges associated with designing social robots that are inspired by neuroscientific principles. (shrink)

In agreement with the target article, we would like to point out a few aspects related to embodiment which further support the position of biorobotics. We argue that, especially when complex systems are considered, modeling through a physical implementation can provide hints to comprehend the whole picture behind the specific set of experimental data.

El leitmotiv que impulsa a Jaime Balmes en todo su quehacer es un profundo amor a la verdad. Con él se da comienzo al estudio de su Antropología, pues es gracias a esa confianza y apuesta por la verdad-realidad por la que se justifica y alienta la búsqueda concreta de la verdad del ser humano. Partiendo de ella, revitalizada la verdad y nuestra capacidad cognoscitiva, Balmes afronta el problema antropológico contemporáneo, a saber, si existe la naturaleza humana y qué sea (...) ésta. Rescata así, prontamente, la esencia y la existencia humanas, esto es, la verdad y la libertad del hombre, existencia libre que sólo puede llegar a su perfección si asume y desarrolla su propia esencia o verdad –«La verdad os hará libres»–. Recuperada la naturaleza humana, su esencia, Balmes se puede preguntar por qué sea ésta, por qué es el ser humano. Siguiendo su realismo metodológico (objetivo y subjetivo), se aborda esta importante cuestión desde un primer estudio analítico (lo que le liberaba de cualquier forma de panteísmo), completándolo con el sintético posterior (librándole entonces del exceso relativista). Pero esta división metodológica se va a mostrar, en la antropología balmesiana, como clave misma de interpretación del ser y misterio humano: Antropología integral e integradora que permite comprender y acoger al ser humano en toda su riqueza y diversidad, y le ofrece el camino de la armonía o unidad, en esa diversidad (interior y exterior), como clave para alcanzar su máxima plenitud. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo examine how physical and psychological childbirth experiences affect maternal perceptions and experiences of early infant behavioural style.BackgroundUnnecessary interventions may disturb the normal progression of physiological childbirth and instinctive neonatal behaviours that facilitate mother–infant bonding and breastfeeding. While little is known about how a medicalised birth may influence developing infant temperament, high impact interventions which affect neonatal crying and cortisol levels could have longer term consequences for infant behaviour and functioning.MethodsA retrospective Internet survey was designed to fully explore maternal experiences (...) of childbirth and her postnatal perceptions of infant behaviour. Data collected from 999 mother–infant dyads were analysed using Pearson’s correlations and multiple analyses of covariance, employing the Bonferroni method of correction to establish initially significant variables. Multiple linear regressions were conducted to determine major perinatal contributors to perceived early infant temperament.ResultsMultiple regression analyses on each of the eight Mother and Baby Scales outcome variables indicated that early infant behavioural style was largely predicted by subjective maternal states during and post-childbirth, postnatal depression scores, maternal personality traits and infant age. For example, infant age was the most significant predictor of Alert-Responsive infant behaviour, followed by maternal Postnatal Positive experience. In contrast, depression scores were the most significant predictor of Unsettled-Irregular infant behaviour, followed by Anxious-Afraid Birth Emotions and infant age. Mothers also perceived their infants as more Alert-Responsive and Easier overall after a Supported birth experience.ConclusionMaternal and infant outcomes were influenced by multiple physical and psychological perinatal variables. The mother’s subjective experience appeared to be of equal significance to more objective factors. Social support enhanced the mother’s childbirth experience, benefitting her perceptions of her baby’s early temperament. These findings provide further support for current World Health Organisation intrapartum guidelines on the importance of making childbirth a ‘positive experience’ for women. (shrink)

In 1665 Athanasius Kircher published the treatise Mundus Subterraneus, to ex-plore the complex relationships between the visible forms of the landscape and the reasons that produce them. Kircher was peer of Claude Lorrain, who gave a critical contribution in founding landscape as an artistic genre, making indistinguishable its existence as a real place and its representation as a picture. Compared to Kircher, Lorrain had the greatest influence on Western landscape culture. Yet today, thanks to scholars and landscape architecture practitioners, Kircher’s (...) intuition seems effective to describe the contemporary idea of landscape as a performative field, encompassing all living forms, soils and waters, and intangible substances working together, impossible to understand just by the investigation of their visible forms. Today landscape exists because it is perceived and because it works: Lorrain and Kircher have finally met. (shrink)

This research compared job involvement level between congruence personality types and work environmental model. Holland has categorized personality orientation in to six types: Realistic (R), Investigative (I), Artistic (A), Social (S), Enterprising (E), and Conventional (C). Subject of this study was administration employee from X University. The background of the education of the respondents at least junior high school level and have one year experience in X University. One-way Anova calculation shows that year work experience of job involvement between employee (...) with different personality types.  . (shrink)

This paper reports about our investigation on action understanding in the brain. We review recent results of the neurophysiology of the mirror system in the monkey. Based on these observations we propose a model of this brain system which is responsible for action recognition. The link between object affordances and action understanding is considered. To support our hypothesis we describe two experiments where some aspects of the model have been implemented. In the first experiment an action recognition system is trained (...) by using data recorded from human movements. In the second experiment, the model is partially implemented on a humanoid robot which learns to mimic simple actions performed by a human subject on different objects. These experiments show that motor information can have a significant role in action interpretation and that a mirror-like representation can be developed autonomously as a result of the interaction between an individual and the environment. (shrink)