Mediating role of coping styles in the relationship between anxiety and health behaviors of obese adolescents Obesity is one of the major health problems in adolescents. Health-detrimental lifestyle as well as maladaptive styles of coping with stress are regarded as belonging among determinants of obesity. The aim of the study was to establish factors mediating between anxiety and diet-related health behaviors. Participants in the study were 113 adolescents with obesity whose body weight was over 97th centile. They were examined using (...) a set of self-report questionnaires to measure anxiety, coping styles and health behaviors. Emotion-focused coping and seeking social contacts were found to act as mediators between adolescents' trait anxiety and their health behaviors. The findings suggest that to enhance obese adolescents' health-promoting behaviors appropriate conditions should be ensured that would not only enable them to express their emotions, but also promote their socializing with peers. (shrink)

The development of nursing began in Poland much later than it did elsewhere, for instance in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Germany, and it came up against difficult conditions. After a brief twenty‐year period of development between 1918 and 1939, it almost stalled during the war (1939–45), only to be followed by nearly twenty years of chaos. Nursing started to come out of this difficult period at the beginning of the 1960s. The turn of the 21st century saw (...) the emergence of extensive professional development and training opportunities for nurses. This change was brought about as much by political, social and economic issues, health care requirements, and the advancement of science, medicine, the birth of humanitarism, the growth of the feminist movement, the European Agreement on the Instruction and Education of Nurses, the WHO European Strategy for Nursing and Midwifery Education, the Bologna declaration, as well as the activities undertaken by the European Union, the International Council of Nurses, the American and Polish Red Cross, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Polish Association of Nurses, and the professional self‐governing body. The transformation of nursing into an independent profession was further boosted by physicians deeply involved in the issue and female pioneers of nursing. (shrink)

What kind of challenge does sexual and racial difference pose for postmodern ethics? What is the relation between ethical obligation and feminist interpretations of embodiment, passion, and eros? How can we negotiate between ethical responsibility for the Other and democratic struggles against domination, injustice, and equality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other? We cannot address such questions, Ziarek argues, without putting into dialogue discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, (...) and the idea of radical democracy. Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers - including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray - the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism. (shrink)

Utilization of resources in coping with chronic illness Research conducted to date has evidenced the importance of single resources for adaptation to illness. The aim of the presented study was to take into account many resources so as to determine their structure and the way of utilization in various patient groups. The Resourcefulness for Recovery Inventory measuring 18 personal and social resources was used for this purpose. Participants in the study were 115 patients suffering from cardiovascular or rheumatoid diseases, or (...) from cancer. The patients were found to utilize cognitive, emotional and behavioral resources, as well as social support in their adaptation to illness. The highest level of resource utilization was found in the cardiac group, and the lowest - in cancer patients. (shrink)

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological responses. Based (...) on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

A method of defining semantics of logics based on not necessarily distributive lattices is presented. The key elements of the method are representation theorems for lattices and duality between classes of lattices and classes of some relational systems . We suggest a type of duality referred to as a duality via truth which leads to Kripke-style semantics and three-valued semantics in the style of Allwein-Dunn. We develop two new representation theorems for lattices which, together with the existing theorems by Urquhart (...) and Bimbo-Dunn, constitute a complete, in a sense, representation theory for lattices. As observed by Dunn and Hardegree, variations of Urquhart's duality arise by varying his disjointness assumption on the canonical frame. Four possible assumptions – disjoint, exhaustive, non-disjoint and non-exhaustive – are discussed in the paper. Each of the four corresponding representation theorems is expanded to a duality via truth. Based on these dualities we suggest four corresponding types of semantics for lattice-based logics. We also discuss a new topological representation of lattices. (shrink)

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

A method is presented for constructing natural deduction-style systems for propositional relevant logics. The method consists in first translating formulas of relevant logics into ternary relations, and then defining deduction rules for a corresponding logic of ternary relations. Proof systems of that form are given for various relevant logics. A class of algebras of ternary relations is introduced that provides a relation-algebraic semantics for relevant logics.

Antoni Kępiński, one of the most famous Polish psychiatrists, points to man as an ethical being. The philosopher is aware that particular moral norms have their different origins. According to his concept, their primary source is natural law. From it stem basic human decisions. In addition to this most important source, Kępiński also lists other sources that may also have an impact on human decisions. As one of the few professors, he points to genetic predispositions as one of the possible (...) sources of human morality. Social influences are also important to him. (shrink)

This paper examines early syntactic development from a usage-based perspective, using transcripts of the spontaneous speech of two Englishspeaking children recorded at relatively dense intervals at ages 2;0 and 3;0. We focus primarily on the children’s question constructions, in an effort to determine (i) what kinds of units they initially extract from the input (their size and degree of specificity / abstractness); (ii) what operations they must perform in order to construct novel utterances using these units; and (iii) how the (...) units and the operations change between the ages of two and three. In contrast to nativist theories of language development which suggest that children are working with abstract syntactic categories from an early point in development, we suggest that the data are better accounted for by the proposal that children begin with lexically specific phrases and gradually build up a repertoire of increasingly abstract constructions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 4 Seiten: 617-653.

This article provides an overview of development of Kripke semantics for logics determined by information systems. The proposals are made to extend the standard Kripke structures to the structures based on information systems. The underlying logics are defined and problems of their axiomatization are discussed. Several open problems connected with the logics are formulated. Logical aspects of incompleteness of information provided by information systems are considered.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Radical Female Imaginary: Temporality and Embodiment in Irigaray’s EthicsEwa Plonowska Ziarek* (bio)An important intervention of Irigaray’s work on sexual difference into the postmodern debates on ethics is the mediation between two different lines of ethical inquiry: one represented by the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault, and, to a certain degree, Castoriadis, and the other by the work of Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard. Although the two trajectories both (...) depart from the notion of morality as a universal system of law and judgment, they represent different approaches to freedom and obligation. For Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard, the ethical significance of alterity disrupts social systems of signification and, in this sense, marks transcendence as a break in discourse, whereas for Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, otherness is expressed within the endless variations of becoming. To elucidate this difference, it might be useful to recall John Caputo’s distinction between two kinds of postmodern ethics—the Nietzschean heteromorphism and the Levinasian heteronomy. In its emphasis on becoming and change, heteromorphism, Caputo claims, puts forward the claim of liberation but cannot accommodate an obligation to the other: “In heteromorphism, the aim is freedom from inhibition and blockage, freedom from... the weight of values... from everything that weighs the will down....” By contrast, the Levinasian ethics of alterity gives priority to the obligation to the other, which calls the freedom of the subject into question: “freedom is suspect, suspended, held in question, because it is aggressive, self-accumulative, and eventually, finally murderous. Heteronomism wants the other to be free while one is oneself held hostage” [Caputo 60].In my discussion of the radical female imaginary I would like to show that Irigaray’s work refuses to align itself with either side of this divide. Originating in the very gap between liberation and responsibility, self and other, immanence and transcendence, freedom and obligation, the feminist ethics of sexual difference cannot disregard any of these claims. For Irigaray, the ethics of sexual difference has to enable different trajectories of gendered becomings without forgetting the obligation to the other. In fact, Irigaray argues that the responsibility to the other who differs sexually is the very source of such becomings. Irigaray’s ethics maintains neither the rigid separation between freedom and obligation, as is the case in Levinas’s work, nor their symmetrical reversibility, as is the case in Kant’s ethics. By contesting the oppositions between carnal passions and ethical obligations, between the respect for the other and the becoming of the self, Irigaray allows us to think through the disjunction between the two main ethical trajectories of postmodernism and to find the means to negotiate between them. In this essay I would like [End Page 60] to focus on two moments of such negotiation: the becoming of sexed bodies and the temporality of the female imaginary.One of Irigaray’s famous claims is the charge of the forgetting of sexed bodies in the discourses of philosophy, science, linguistics, and politics. Although this claim is certainly not new in feminist theory, what is original in Irigaray’s work is the diagnosis of the numerous symptoms of such forgetting, for instance, the relation she makes between the erasure of the sexed body and the nihilism of Western culture. For Irigaray, the forgetting of sexual difference manifests itself not only in the disregard for the specificity of feminine embodiment, desires, and genealogies but also in the disembodied character of linguistic analyses, in the erasure of the drama of enunciation evident in the privilege given to predication, in the separation of the subject of knowledge from carnality and desire, in the infatuation with formalism and with its obverse side, the crippling nostalgia for the maternal body, and, finally, in the rigid separation between the immanence of flesh and the transcendence of the spirit. 1 Even more striking is the originality of Irigaray’s intervention, which links the question of sexual difference with the temporality of the body.An important element of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference is the recovery of “that repressed entity, the female imaginary” [TS 28]. Despite numerous excellent discussions of the imaginary in Irigaray’s work, the complexity of her negotiations around this... (shrink)

How Tocqueville’s ideas can help us build resilient liberal democracies in a divided world How can today’s liberal democracies withstand the illiberal wave sweeping the globe? What can revive our waning faith in constitutional democracy? Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours argues that Alexis de Tocqueville, one of democracy’s greatest champions and most incisive critics, can guide us forward. Drawing on Tocqueville’s major works and lesser-known policy writings, Ewa Atanassow shines a bright light on the foundations of liberal democracy. She argues that (...) its prospects depend on how we tackle three dilemmas that were as urgent in Tocqueville’s day as they are in ours: how to institutionalize popular sovereignty, how to define nationhood, and how to grasp the possibility and limits of global governance. These are pivotal but often neglected dimensions of Tocqueville’s work, and this fresh look at his writings provides a powerful framework for addressing the tensions between liberalism and democracy in the twenty-first century. Recovering a richer liberalism capable of weathering today’s political storms, Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours explains how we can reclaim nationalism as a liberal force and reimagine sovereignty in a global age—and do so with one of democracy’s most discerning thinkers as our guide. (shrink)

Changes in Metaphor Comprehension in Children The aim of the study was to follow the implicit patterns in children's responses to metaphor describing human by means of a name of animal. The main problem in present study was: which traits of topic would be spontaneously used by children from three age groups? The study followed a quasi-experimental design. The subjects were 77 children from three age groups: 5;6-6;0, 8;0-8;6, 9;6-10;0. The dependent variable: the level of comprehension of 18 metaphors with (...) vehicles from the animal domain and one topic - human. The variable was measured through individual Piagetian interviews. The study confirmed the hypothesis that the ability to activate metaphorical thinking in order to describe human attributes increases with age, with a turning point around 8 year of life. The traits mentioned by subjects could be classified into five categories: unambiguous evaluations, physical features, behavior, behavioral traits, dispositions and agency. Older children assigned more human dispositional traits, thoughts and preferences to the objects of metaphors. Younger ones often focused on the physical features of animals. With age, the tendency to give positive evaluations to the objects of metaphors increases. (shrink)

I present the scope andcharacteristics of Marx''s interest in Russiaand review its evolution. Initially, Marx''sattitudes were marked by russophobia,pronounced anti-panslavism, assessments ofRussia as an outpost of European reaction andcounterrevolution, and even as the head of aconspiracy to block the world revolution. Withtime, however, Marx came to consider Russia asthe country in which the outbreak of theRevolution was most likely. In his research forsucessive volumes of Capital, he readRussian theoretical works by, among others, V.Bervi-Flerovskij and A. Koshelev. Marx''sattitudes to the anticipated (...) peasant revolutionin Russia remained ambivalent; to a certaindegree he feared its occurrence suspecting thatit could take on an `asiatic'' hue. (shrink)

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also faced problems, (...) which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 479-491.

This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a " things." This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is "real," where "regaining" the object is conceived as a means for re-establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between the (...) organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin Heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to Bruno Latour's idea of the agency of things and object-oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics. To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person in Argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the "contradictory" or anomalous status of the present-absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present-absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ Algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square. (shrink)

The paper examines the evolution of Marek Siemek’s “dialogical principle.” The early version of this principle, sketched in the essay “Dialogue and Its Myth”, meets several criteria of the phenomenology of dialogue and even hermeneutics. However, Siemek has continued to change his concept of dialogue over the decades. In his recent book, Freedom, Reason, Intersubjectivity, he explores transcendental preconditions of free and reasonable activism, i.e., the Fichtean “limitative synthesis” of I and Non-I and its applications in social interrelations. He no (...) longer considers the empirical, anthropological, and phenomenological aspects of dialogics and mutual recognition. He also replaces mutuality with reciprocity, asymmetry with symmetry, and phenomenology with transcendentalism. (shrink)

Interactions of fathers and their children with autism1 The aim of the present study was to compare the activity of fathers and their children with autism with those of children with Down syndrome, and normally developing children during the father-child interaction. Participants were 14 children with autism and their fathers, 15 children with Down syndrome and their fathers, and 16 normally developing children and their fathers. The age of subjects was between 3.0 and 6.0 years old. The study consisted of (...) one 15-minute free-play session in the father-child diad, taking place in the experiment room. Differences between the groups of fathers were found in terms of three variables under analysis: frequency of looking at the child, physical contact with the child and suggesting play. Children with autism brought objects to their fathers or pointed out objects and directed their fathers' attention by vocalising less frequently than children with Down syndrome and normally developing children. Moreover, children with autism exhibited the fewest vocalisations combined with looking at the father and exhibited many more behaviours involving running and moving about the room than normally developing children. Self-stimulating behaviours were the most frequent in children with autism, with no differences in that respect found between children with Down syndrome and normally developing children. The analysis of fathers' behaviour demonstrates that fathers of children with developmental disorders focus on observing their children and attempt to keep close contact with them to a larger extent than fathers of normally developing children. The pattern of differences in the activity of fathers of children with autism and children with Down syndrome does not paint a clear picture. In general, fathers from both groups actively sought to maintain contact with their children. Differences in the activity during play between children with autism and the other subjects in the study are consistent with the clinical features of autism. (shrink)

Melancholia is a hybrid concept, deployed in feminist and philosophical theories politics and aesthetics, but ‘properly” belonging to neither. This heterogeneity of melancholia as both an aesthetic and a political category allows us to interrogate the interrelationship between gender politics and aesthetics without, however, abolishing their differences. Reinterpreted in the context of a feminist aesthetics, melancholia not only points to art’s origin in the unjust and gendered division of labor and power but also to the ethical and political task of (...) art to bear witness to the mute suffering of women cut off from the signifying possibilities of language. Moving beyond the entrenched oppositions between historicism/subjectivism, subject/object, or formalism /materialism, my own approach to an aesthetics of melancholia in women’s modern novels stresses unpredictable, conflicting migrations of pain between subjects and objects, political oppression and autonomous art, language and affect. (shrink)

While many linguists view language as either a cognitive or a social phenomenon, it is clearly both: a language can live only in individual minds, but it is learned from examples of utterances produced by speakers engaged in communicative interaction. In other words, language is what (Keller 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Taylor & Francis) calls a “phenomenon of the third kind”, emerging from the interaction of a micro-level and a macro-level. Such a dual perspective (...) helps us understand some otherwise puzzling phenomena, including “non-psychological” generalizations, or situations where a pattern which is arguably present in a language is not explicitly represented in most speakers’ minds. This paper discusses two very different examples of such generalizations, genitive marking on masculine nouns in Polish and some restrictions on questions with long-distance dependencies in English. It is argued that such situations are possible because speakers may represent “the same” knowledge at different levels of abstraction: while a few may have extracted an abstract generalization, others approximate their behaviour by relying on memorised exemplars or lexically specific patterns. Thus, a cognitively realistic usage-based construction grammar needs to distinguish between patterns in the usage of a particular speech community (a social phenomenon) and patterns in speakers’ minds (a cognitive phenomenon). (shrink)

Psychosocial coping resources and health among Germans and Poles Culture has a substantial impact on mechanism of coping with stress and related health outcomes. We proposed a model emphasizing the mediating role of coping resources and competences in the relationship between controllability of demands in professional/educational life and health in the cross-cultural context. The model is based on the transactional model of stress. 595 participants from East Germany, West Germany and Poland completed: Sense of Coherence Scale SOC-9, Self-Esteem Scale, Social (...) Support Scale, Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale, Proactive Coping Inventory, Scale of Demands in Professional Life, Brief Stress Scale, Satisfaction with Life Scale and Mental Health Questionnaire. The results have shown the general cross-cultural validity of the proposed mediational model but also indicated some cultural differences in the determinants of health. Germans had higher self-esteem and social support. Poles had higher self-efficacy and used proactive coping strategies more often. Self-esteem was the strongest predictor of mental health in both nations. We discussed the results within a broad interpretive framework of social transitions. (shrink)

Financial exclusion can be considered one of the important problems at the average level of socioeconomic development, which includes, among others, Poland. It consists in the presence of difficulties in accessing and/or using financial products and services on the main market that are suitable for the needs of individuals, and prevents them from leading a normal life in society. Due to its own characteristics and the trends in financial markets, this phenomenon is closely linked to the issue of the digital (...) divide. Accordingly, it can be seen that solutions leading to the reduction of the financial exclusion are based on tools using information technology innovations and modern technologies. One of the methods recognized as the most effective in this area is financial education, which is aimed largely at children and adolescents, which justifies additionally the choice of such tools. It was equally important to determine the extent to which modern instruments are preferred in comparison to traditional ones. The aim of this paper will be the analysis of the solutions based on modern technologies that are used in actions taken to prevent financial exclusion in selected EU countries, including Poland. The structure of the paper is as follows: the first part will present the problem of financial exclusion (identifying groups particularly at risk), then it will review methods of preventing and combating financial exclusion, with particular emphasis on modern ICT tools, and the final part will indicate the possible directions and barriers facing the solutions that may lead to a reduced level of financial exclusion of individuals. The method made use of indepth analysis of the literature and a review of existing solutions, which financial institutions provide on the Web. (shrink)