This paper explores the gendered discourses of the – seemingly favourable – media coverage that certain Heads of State received for their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking at media reports published in different English-speaking outlets in the US, the UK, India, Bangladesh, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland, and using multimodal feminist critical discourse analysis, we identify and describe strategies that on the surface appear to challenge hegemonic – and largely masculine – discourses of leadership. Upon closer scrutiny, these (...) superficially complimentary reports rather reinforce and naturalise discriminatory gender ideologies, and, as we demonstrate, they do so to different degrees along a continuum of essentialising, contextualising, and problematising. We critically discuss the discursive and visual processes involved and show that complimenting these leaders on their performance compares them against a masculine norm to construct their leadership as ‘alternative’, exceptional, and hence marked. This gendered portrayal of political leadership in times of crisis illustrates how the discursive construction of identities, responsibilities, and relationships during COVID-19 largely hinges on power relations and political ideologies that systematically disadvantage and undermine women. The purportedly positive form in which this occurs makes it particularly difficult to challenge and subvert these discriminatory discourses and their underlying gendered ideologies. (shrink)

This article argues that attention and distraction form a central concern of Benjamin's writings on literature. Individually and in conjunction, they underpin processes of textual production and reception, yet their relationship is fluid and subject to historical change. In this respect, Benjamin's exploration of the interplay of attention and distraction in writers such as Leskov, Baudelaire and Brecht also leads to more general reflections about the social, cultural and psychological shifts brought about by industrialization and modern mass culture. Benjamin's writings (...) on literature trace developments which he also explores in relation to film. And echoes of his ‘literary history of attention’ can also be found in both his own critical approach and his self-reflexive comments on the process of writing. (shrink)

Technologien haben schon lange Eingang in unseren Alltag gefunden und transformieren zahlreiche Lebensbereiche wie Politik, Wirtschaft, Bildung, Gesundheit und Pflege. Mittels Social Media pflegen wir zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen und kommunizieren miteinander, wir haben Apps zum Schlafen oder für die Ernährung und in der Medizin werden Technologien in den Körper implantiert oder zur Untersuchung des Körpers verwendet. Wearables, wie z. B. die Smart Watch, werden direkt am Körper getragen und müssen kaum noch abgenommen werden. Smart Watches messen den Puls und Herzschlag, zählen (...) unsere Schritte, melden sich, wenn man wieder aufstehen sollte und erfassen den Schlafrhythmus. Wir schlagen Wissen bei Wikipedia nach und lernen interaktiv über Smart Boards in der Schule. Über digitale Tools lässt sich das orts- und zeitunabhängige Zusammenarbeiten organisieren. Wie verändert sich das Menschsein in einer solchen technisierten Welt? Wie verändern sich die menschliche Lebenswelt, Handeln, Verantwortungsstrukturen und Identitätskonzepte? Puzio, Anna/Rutzmoser, Carolin/Endres, Eva-Maria: Menschsein in einer technisierten Welt – Einleitende Bemerkungen zu einer interdisziplinären Auseinandersetzung mit der digitalen Transformation. In: Endres, Eva-Maria/Puzio, Anna/Rutzmoser, Carolin (Hg.): Menschsein in einer technisierten Welt. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf den Menschen im Zeichen der digitalen Transformation. Wiesbaden 2022. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition assume that concepts are grounded in non-linguistic, sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that upwards response movements are faster than downwards movements after participants have been presented with words whose referents are typically located in the upper vertical space. This is taken as evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. This congruency effect was also found for novel words, after participants learned these words as labels for novel objects that (...) they encountered either in their upper or lower visual field. While this indicates that direct experience with a word's referent is sufficient to evoke said congruency effects, the present study investigates whether this direct experience is also a necessary condition. To this end, we conducted five experiments in which participants learned novel words from purely linguistic input: Novel words were presented in pairs with real up- or down-words ; they were presented in natural sentences where they replaced these real words ; they were presented as new labels for these real words ; and they were presented as labels for novel combined concepts based on these real words. In all five experiments, we did not find any congruency effects elicited by the novel words; however, participants were always able to make correct explicit judgements about the vertical dimension associated to the novel words. These results suggest that direct experience is necessary for reactivating experiential traces, but this reactivation is not a necessary condition for understanding the corresponding aspects of word meaning. (shrink)

This paper presents a holistic, contextualised case study of reintegration and trust repair at a UK utilities firm in the wake of its fraud and data manipulation scandal. Drawing upon conceptual frameworks of reintegration and organizational trust repair, we analyze the decisions and actions taken by the company in its efforts to restore trust with its stakeholders. The analysis reveals seven themes on the merits of proposed approaches for reintegration after an integrity violation , and novel insights on the role (...) of organizational identity, “changing of the guard” and cultural reforms alongside procedural modifications. The case further supports the dynamic nature of stakeholder salience across the reintegration process. The study both supports propositions from existing frameworks and suggests novel theoretical extensions for future research. (shrink)

The digital revolution has made a multitude of text documents from highly diverse perspectives on almost any topic easily available. Accordingly, the ability to integrate and evaluate information from different sources, known as multiple document comprehension, has become increasingly important. Because multiple document comprehension requires the integration of content and source information across texts, it is assumed to exceed the demands of single text comprehension due to the inclusion of two additional mental representations: the integrated situation model and the intertext (...) model. To date, there is little empirical evidence on commonalities and differences between single text and multiple document comprehension. Although the relationships between single text and multiple document comprehension can be well distinguished conceptually, there is a lack of empirical studies supporting these assumptions. Therefore, we investigated the dimensional structure of single text and multiple document comprehension with similar test setups. We examined commonalities and differences between the two forms of text comprehension in terms of their relations to final school exam grades, level of university studies and university performance. Using a sample of n = 501 students from two German universities, we jointly modeled single text and multiple document comprehension and applied a series of regression models. Concerning the relationship between single text and multiple document compr... (shrink)

In 1978 and 1979 around 6.770 women in the GDR were infected with the hepatitis C virus after they had received a contaminated Anti-D-Immunprophylaxis. This prophylaxis was used after delivery, abortion or miscarriage. Until September 1979 2.769 women came down with Hepatitis. The reaction of the state showed how closely medicine and politics were linked in the GDR and what kind of influence governmental decisions had on medical action. The state wanted to keep everything as a secret. The producer of (...) the Anti-D-Immunglobulin in the GDR was sentenced as a pawn sacrifice in a non-public trial. The Ministry of State Security was also involved. Many of the infected women were traumatized by not being informed what had happened and had to fight for recognition and compensation until today. (shrink)

Corporate reputation is decisive for stakeholders’ supporting or repelling behavior and, therefore, one of firms’ most valuable intangible resources. Drawing on signaling theory, this paper focuses on the usefulness of voluntarily provided corporate reputation disclosures (CRDs) and examines their impact on stakeholders’ attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Our experimental vignette studies reveal that CRDs reduce stakeholders’ information asymmetries, which positively affects perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation as well as stakeholders’ purchase, investment, and employment intentions. The relationships between CRDs and stakeholders’ (...) behavioral intentions are sequentially mediated by changes in the perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation. This implies that stakeholders use the signals transmitted by CRDs to adjust their perceptions of a firm’s organizational performance and corporate reputation, which ultimately induces their behavioral outcomes. Overall, our empirical results show the usefulness of CRDs for firms in effectively developing stakeholder relationships and, thereby, contributing to assure their going concern. For stakeholders, CRDs improve efficiency in evaluating a firm’s future development. (shrink)

Gehen zu können, wenn man will – das ist für viele Menschen eine Kurzformel für Freiheit. Einen Ort zu verlassen, an dem einen nichts mehr hält, und zu neuen Ufern aufzubrechen, bedeutet Handlungsmacht und Autonomie. Wegzugehen heißt in vielen Fällen aber auch, Abschied von Personen und einer bisherigen gemeinsamen Lebenspraxis zu nehmen. Geht es um die Trennung vom vertrauten sozialen Umfeld und von den gewohnten Lebensformen, wird dies oft als Verlust befürchtet und erlebt. Die Freiheit zu gehen ist deshalb vor (...) allem als Option wichtig, als Möglichkeit, von der wir Gebrauch machen können, aber nicht müssen. Auch wenn Ausstiegsoptionen nicht wahrgenommen werden, prägen sie die Situation – sie ermöglichen es, die bestehenden Verhältnisse infrage zu stellen, stärken Verhandlungspositionen in Konfliktfällen und machen das Bleiben zu einer freien Entscheidung. (shrink)

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that (...) the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation. (shrink)

The Unbeatable Light: Melammu and Its Biblical Parallels. By Shawn Zelig Aster. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 384. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012. Pp. xviii + 421. $114. [Distributed in North America by Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind.].

Spannungsverhältnisse zwischen Natur und Mensch prägen unseren Alltag, unsere Sprache und öffentliche Diskurse im Themenspektrum der Nachhaltigkeit. Letztere entfaltet normatives Potential, steht bildungs- und wirtschaftspolitisch im Zentrum und bildet sich in der Literatur ab. Natur, Umwelt und Nachhaltigkeit sind Themen, die viele Wissensdomänen berühren – von naturwissenschaftlichen Fragen über rechtliche Aspekte bis zu Überlegungen der Sprachkritik. Sie bedürfen einer Betrachtung aus verschiedensten Fachdisziplinen, wie es etwa auch im Rahmen der Environmental Humanities gefordert wird. Um in diesem Zuge die Relevanz sprachbezogener (...) Zugänge und Wissenschaften zu stärken, führt dieser Band Perspektiven der Literaturwissenschaft, Didaktik, BNE, Human Animal Studies, Geschichte, Philosophie usw. mit Beiträgen aus verschiedenen neueren und auch traditionellen linguistischen Teilbereichen zusammen, wie beispielsweise der Ökolinguistik, der Diskurslinguistik oder der Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation. Der Band eröffnet somit für Wissenschaftler*innen aus Linguistik und anderen Fachdisziplinen sowie für interessierte Lehrkräfte Einblicke in interdisziplinäre Zugänge zu sprachlichen Perspektiven auf Nachhaltigkeit. (shrink)

School gardens are part of many schools. Especially in primary schools, but also in secondary schools, they are used as a learning space and experience space for the pupils. Their importance for the development of cognitive and emotional-affective abilities of pupils is empirically well proven. It is also empirically well proven that exposure to nature has an influence on the prosocial behavior of children and adults. However, there is a lack of studies investigating the effect of the stay in the (...) school garden on the social behavior of pupils in secondary class. To investigate whether a school garden is a good environment for social learning, a self-report study and standardized observations with sixth-grade pupils were carried out. Thus, the socially competent behavior of the pupils (communication and cooperation) and their emotions could be analyzed. In order to provide emotional access to the scientific content of biology lessons and to strengthen social learning, each pupil was responsible for their own plant and the group bed over a period of 10 weeks. The design of the lessons followed the principles of basic needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness—of the Self Determination Theory. The observations were made during a 90-min class, in the school garden as well in the classroom. The 31 girls and 22 boys, aged 11–12 years, changed weekly between the garden and the classroom. Over 150 observations were made in the school garden (82) and in the classroom (68). In summary, pupils showed more socially competent behavior in school garden lessons than in classroom lessons. The school garden lessons, designed according to the basic needs, seem to create favorable incentives for social learning. Due to frequent social interactions, it can be assumed that learning activities in school gardens can promote emotional and social competence. (shrink)

A recent report from the UN makes the case for “global data literacy” in order to realise the opportunities afforded by the “data revolution”. Here and in many other contexts, data literacy is characterised in terms of a combination of numerical, statistical and technical capacities. In this article, we argue for an expansion of the concept to include not just competencies in reading and working with datasets but also the ability to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider (...) socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed – which we call “data infrastructure literacy”. We illustrate this notion with examples of “inventive data practice” from previous and ongoing research on open data, online platforms, data journalism and data activism. Drawing on these perspectives, we argue that data literacy initiatives might cultivate sensibilities not only for data science but also for data sociology, data politics as well as wider public engagement with digital data infrastructures. The proposed notion of data infrastructure literacy is intended to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended. (shrink)

Research into consumer responses to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives has expanded in the past four decades, yet the evidence thus far provided does not paint a cohesive picture. Results suggest both positive and negative consumer reactions to CSR, and unless such mixed findings can be reconciled, the outcome might be an amalgamation of disparate empirical results rather than a coherent body of knowledge. The current meta-analysis therefore tests whether the mixed findings might reflect consumers’ distinct, altruistic inferences across various (...) contingency factors. On the basis of 337 effect sizes, involving 584,990 unique respondents, in 162 studies published between 1996 and 2021, this study reveals that altruistic inferences are central to the current CSR paradigm, such that they mediate the effects of CSR initiatives on consumer responses across multiple contingencies. The mediation by altruistic inferences is stronger (weaker) in conditions favorable to dispositional (situational) motive attributions. Furthermore, consumers respond more favorably to cause marketing or philanthropy rather than business-related CSR initiatives, when the initiative is environmental (vs. social), the firm’s offering is utilitarian (vs. hedonic), the CSR initiative takes place in self-expressive (vs. survival) cultures and in earlier (vs. later) periods. These findings offer several ethical implications, and they inform both practical recommendations and an agenda for further research directions. (shrink)

Digitalisierung und technologischer Fortschritt verändern das menschliche Selbstverständnis. Während sich der Mensch in Abgrenzung zu Tier und Natur als kultiviertes und autonom handelndes Wesen definiert, steht er angesichts der zunehmenden Technologisierung nun vor der Frage: Was bedeutet Menschsein vor dem Hintergrund der neuen Technologien? Wie verändern sich die menschliche Lebenswelt, Verantwortungsstrukturen und Identitätskonzepte? Was können Menschen, was Technologien nicht können? Was macht den Menschen aus und wo wird er in Frage gestellt? Der Band bietet einen umfassenden Blick auf diese Fragestellungen. (...) Im ersten Teil befassen sich Beiträge aus der Philosophie und Anthropologie mit dem Spannungsfeld Mensch-Maschine. Die anschließenden Beiträge eröffnen interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf die technisierte Lebenswelt des Menschen in den Bereichen Kultur, Kommunikation und Bildung. Im letzten Teil des Bandes wird schließlich als Kontrapunkt das Menschsein in einer technisierten Welt aus der Perspektive von Spiritualität und Pflege in den Blick genommen. (shrink)

This brief introduction offers a survey of the contributed papers to this volume.

Two recent articles1, 2 provide computational and empirical validation of the following analytical fact: the outcome of competition between an invading genotype and that of a resident population is determined by the rate at which the population returns to its original size after a random perturbation. This phenomenon can be quantitatively described in terms of the demographic parameter termed “evolutionary entropy”, a measure of the variability in the age at which individuals produce offspring and die. The two articles also validate (...) certain predictions of directionality theory, an evolutionary model that integrates demography and ecology with population genetics. In particular, directionality theory predicts that in populations that spend the greater part of their life cycle in the stationary growth phase, evolution will result in an increase in entropy. These species will be described by a late age of sexual maturity, small progeny sets and a broad reproductive time-span. In populations that undergo large fluctuations in size, however, the evolutionary outcome will be different. When the average size is large, evolution will result in a decrease in entropy—these populations will be described by early age of sexual maturity, large numbers of offspring and narrow reproductive span but when the average size is small, the evolutionary outcome will be random and non-directional. BioEssays 27:1097–1101, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has focused its obesity prevention and control efforts on improving population-level health. A recent Institute of Medicine report identified systems that affect population health, to include health care delivery systems, schools, businesses and employers, communities, and governmental public health infrastructure. CDC uses the public health model to engage these systems, and this process coordinates multiple settings, sectors, and jurisdictions to develop an integrated approach to identify, prevent, and control obesity. The public health approach (...) goes beyond medical care to prioritize policy and environmental strategies that can be implemented across jurisdictional levels, in collaboration with traditional and nontraditional partners. The process ultimately produces tools, guidelines, and interventions that can be used to prevent and control obesity. In this manuscript, we provide an overview of the public health perspective on obesity, outline the public health framework for addressing obesity, and discuss the rationale for leveraging law-based efforts as a tool to accomplish the public health mission. (shrink)

ObjectivePrevious research has shown reduced interoceptive accuracy in depression. Attention deficit represents a key symptom of depression. Moreover, IAcc is positively correlated with attention. There is no study that investigates the effect of depression on IAcc and attention. The aim of this study is to examine the mediating effect of IAcc on depression and attention.MethodsThirty-six depressed patients from the Psychosomatic Clinic in Windach were matched with 36 healthy controls according to age and sex and were assessed at Ulm University. All (...) participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory-II, the heartbeat perception task to examine IAcc, and the d2 test assessing selective attention.ResultsDepressed patients showed attention deficits—both for general visual attention and IAcc—compared to healthy controls. The mediation analyses revealed that the relationship between depression and attention is not mediated via IAcc. Furthermore, depression predicts IAcc and attention, but these effects are direct and largely unaffected by the respective other variable.DiscussionThe results of the present study highlight both interoceptive as well as attention deficits in depressed patients. No clear mediation between these variables could be shown in this study. More elaborative research is needed to clarify whether different approaches to improve IAcc are effective for these deficits in depressed patients and could therefore be of importance as an additional aspect of therapy in depression. (shrink)

Formal approaches that aim at representing human reasoning should be evaluated based on how humans actually reason. One way of doing so is to investigate whether psychological findings of human reasoning patterns are represented in the theoretical model. The computational logic approach discussed here is the so-called weak completion semantics which is based on the three-valued ᴌukasiewicz logic. We explain how this approach adequately models Byrne’s suppression task, a psychological study where the experimental results show that participants’ conclusions systematically deviate (...) from the classical logically correct answers. As weak completion semantics is a novel technique in the field of computational logic, it is important to examine how it corresponds to other already established non-monotonic approaches. For this purpose we investigate the relation of weak completion with respect to completion and three-valued stable model semantics. In particular, we show that well-founded semantics, a widely accepted approach in the field of non-monotonic reasoning, corresponds to weak completion semantics for a specific class of modified programs. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 112 Heft: 1 Seiten: 243-246.

The essay argues for a concept of absolute truth as a cognitive claim to validity and for the relativity of normative conventions in practical dealings with truth. In opposition to the idea of an absolute imperative to truthfulness, it advocates a relative moral legitimacy of lying. Ritualized public scandals about people lying are often not an expression of honest outrage, but rather serve as an untruthful affirmation of norms about dealing with truth, the social validity of which has already become (...) questionable. (shrink)