The COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on mental health interact with preexisting health risks and disparities to impact varying populations differently. This study explored the relationship between demographic variables, distress and mental health, and vulnerability factors for COVID-19. An online cross-sectional study was conducted from 18 June to 17 July 2020, reflecting the impact of early phase COVID-19 pandemic and related shelter-in-place measures in the United States. Participants were adults residing in the United States, with substantial subsamples of American Indian, Asian American, (...) African-American, and Hispanic and/or Latinx participants, as well as people with disabilities and sexual minorities. Outcomes measured were depression, hopelessness, somatic complaints, anxiety-related disorders, locus of control, and a novel measure of pandemic-related distress. Data were analyzed using analyses of covariance, chi-square test, and correlation coefficients. Generally, younger individuals, and those with less financial power—across all identities—suffered more distress. When controlling for age, lower financial power was associated with higher scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale-Revised, Beck Hopelessness Scale, Patient Health Questionnaire-15, Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders for Adults Panic Disorder, SCARED-A generalized anxiety disorder, SCARED-A obsessive–compulsive disorder, and the COVID-19 Pandemic Distress restriction/disconnection scale. In addition, disparities were found, in general, for marginalized identities by gender, sexual orientation, and disability status. Importantly, each ethnicity subsample showed a unique pattern of relationships between COVID-19 risk variables and mental health symptoms. The results support the hypothesis that any pandemic may amplify preexisting social and financial disparities. Overall, interventions at the clinical, governmental, or health equity level should take into consideration the needs of vulnerable groups. (shrink)

We have previously built a small IKg ([Angle 89] and [Brooks 89]) six legged walking robot named Genghis. It was remarkably successful as a testbed to develop walking and learning algorithms. It encouraged us to build a more fully engineered robot with higher performance. We are building two copies of the robot, both 1.6Kg in mass. Their generic name is Attila. Attila has 24 actuators and over 150 sensors, all connected via a local network (the I2C bus) to 11 (...) onboard computers. (shrink)

With the advent of powerful parallel computers, efforts have commenced to simulate complete mammalian brains. However, so far none of these efforts has produced outcomes close to explaining even the behavioral complexities of animals. In this article, we suggest four challenges that ground this shortcoming. First, we discuss the connection between hypothesis testing and simulations. Typically, efforts to simulate complete mammalian brains lack a clear hypothesis. Second, we treat complications related to a lack of parameter constraints for large-scale simulations. To (...) demonstrate the severity of this issue, we review work on two small-scale neural systems, the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion and the Caenorhabditis elegans nervous system. Both of these small nervous systems are very thoroughly, but not completely understood, mainly due to issues with variable and plastic parameters. Third, we discuss the hierarchical structure of neural systems as a principled obstacle to whole-brain simulations. Different organizational levels imply qualitative differences not only in structure, but in choice and appropriateness of investigative technique and perspective. The challenge of reconciling different levels also undergirds the challenge of simulating and hypothesis testing, as modeling a system is not the same thing as simulating it. Fourth, we point out that animal brains are information processing systems tailored very specifically for the ecological niches the respective animals live in. (shrink)

No one doubts that the reading of authoritative texts lay at the centre of medieval theology, philosophy, and letters; repeated efforts to explain that reading, however, have not been persuasive. The 14 contributors to Ad litterum address the medieval interpretation and use of authoritative texts in the different disciplines united by the medieval practice of reading. The authors share the intention to recover medieval readings as they would want to be recovered. Thus the essays suggest that the present-day reader must (...) replace presumptions about historically pure reading or critically creative reading with the different assumptions evident in the learned culture of the Middle Ages. Central among these assumptions are the analogies of reading that bind together medieval letters, philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

The purpose of this contemporary history study is to analyse nursing strategy documents produced by NHS Trusts in England in the period 2009–2013, through a process of discourse analysis. In 2013 the Francis Report on the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was published. The Report highlighted the full range of organisational failures in a Trust that valued financial efficiency over patient care. The analysis that followed, however, dwelt heavily on the failings of the nurses. Nursing strategy documents at that time served (...) to set the future direction for NHS Trusts, prescribing specific value frameworks for each nursing workforce. However, the values chosen frequently conflicted with each other pitting nursing values against a managerial trope. It is argued that documents provided a response to wider NHS concerns and high-profile failures in care, particularly the Francis Report, paying lip service to staff engagement whilst maintaining a corporate focus. Nursing values were placed firmly within a managerialist discourse, one that has needed to be re-evaluated in the current Covid-19 pandemic. Wider implications of the research suggest discussion of value conflict may be beneficial within nursing education and a truly local approach to strategy creation would potentially promote staff buy-in to strategy documents. (shrink)

Current health policy, high‐profile failures and increased media scrutiny have led to a significant focus on patient experience in Britain's National Health Service (NHS). Patient experience data is typically gathered through surveys of satisfaction. The study aimed to support a better understanding of the patient experience and patients' expression of it through consideration of the aspects of the patient experience on NHS wards which are by their nature impossible to capture through patient satisfaction surveys. Existential phenomenology was used to develop (...) an in‐depth exploratory narrative, expressed through the voices of the participants. Data collection involved in‐depth face‐to‐face interviews with 12 purposively sampled participants, with analysis by means of hermeneutics. Though the individuality of each experience was apparent and cannot be overemphasised, common factors emerging from the data included uncertainty and unexpectedness, suffering and finitude, the futility of feedback and bureaucracy and absurdity. Overall, participants demonstrated how their individual personalities and expectations affected their response both to illness or injury and to their hospital admissions, highlighting feelings of vulnerability and voicelessness as a response to hospitalisation. The findings of this study provide useful insight into the patient experience on British hospital wards, and the value of an existential–phenomenological approach is demonstrated. (shrink)

We describe a new approach for developing and validating cognitive process models. We develop graphical models (specifically, hidden Markov models) both from human empirical data on a task, as well as from synthetic data traces generated by a cognitive process model of human behavior on the task. We show that considering differences between the two graphical models can unveil substantive and nuanced imperfections of cognitive process models that can then be addressed to increase their fidelity to empirical data.

Growing opioid misuse in the United States has resulted in more children living with an adult with an opioid use history. Although an abundance of research has demonstrated a link between opioid misuse and negative parenting behaviors, few intervention efforts have been made to target this underserved population. The Family Check-Up has been tested in more than 25 years of research, across multiple settings, and is an evidence-based program for reducing risk behavior, enhancing parenting skills, and preventing the onset of (...) substance use. It is designed to motivate parents to engage in positive parenting practices and to change problematic parenting and has been tested across a variety of ages including early childhood and adolescence. It is highlighted in NIDA’s Principles of Substance Use Prevention for Early Childhood: A research-based guide as one of only three effective selective prevention programs for substance abuse among families with young children. Recently, we developed an online version of the FCU that has now been adapted for early childhood and families with opioid use histories. The online platform and telehealth model allow for wide-scale dissemination, ease of training with community providers, and increased public health reach for families in remote, rural areas. This is particularly important when targeting families with opioid misuse and addiction because there are high rates of addiction in remote areas, yet few services available. In this article, we describe the FCU Online and review new content in the model that targets a population of young adult parents with substance abuse histories, including opioid use. New modules include content focused on harm reduction for this high-risk population of parents, such as safety in the home, substance use while parenting, and managing conflict with partners and friends. (shrink)

The field of psychology, including cognitive science, is vexed by a crisis of confidence. Although the causes and solutions are varied, we focus here on a common logical problem in inference. The default mode of inference is significance testing, which has a free lunch property where researchers need not make detailed assumptions about the alternative to test the null hypothesis. We present the argument that there is no free lunch; that is, valid testing requires that researchers test the null against (...) a well-specified alternative. We show how this requirement follows from the basic tenets of conventional and Bayesian probability. Moreover, we show in both the conventional and Bayesian framework that not specifying the alternative may lead to rejections of the null hypothesis with scant evidence. We review both frequentist and Bayesian approaches to specifying alternatives, and we show how such specifications improve inference. The field of cognitive science will benefit because consideration of reasonable alternatives will undoubtedly sharpen the intellectual underpinnings of research. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated innovations in data collection protocols, including use of virtual or remote visits. Although developmental scientists used virtual visits prior to COVID-19, validation of virtual assessments of infant socioemotional and language development are lacking. We aimed to fill this gap by validating a virtual visit protocol that assesses mother and infant behavior during the Still Face Paradigm and infant receptive and expressive communication using the Bayley-III Screening Test. Validation was accomplished through comparisons of data collected during (...) in-person laboratory visits and virtual visits conducted via Zoom. Of the 119 mother-infant dyads who participated, 73 participated in lab visits only, 13 participated in virtual visits only, and 33 dyads participated in a combination of lab and virtual visits across four time points. Maternal perspectives of, and preferences for, virtual visits were also assessed. Proportions of missing data were higher during virtual visits, particularly for assessments of infant receptive communication. Nonetheless, comparisons of virtual and laboratory visits within a given time point indicated that mothers and infants showed similar proportions of facial expressions, vocalizations and directions of gaze during the SFP and infants showed similar and expected patterns of behavioral change across SFP episodes. Infants also demonstrated comparable expressive and receptive communicative abilities across virtual and laboratory assessments. Maternal reports of ease and preference for virtual visits varied by infant age, with mothers of 12-month-old infants reporting, on average, less ease of virtual visits and a preference for in-person visits. Results are discussed in terms of feasibility and validity of virtual visits for assessing infant socioemotional and language development, and broader advantages and disadvantages of virtual visits are also considered. (shrink)

1. Sexual Brains and Body Politics 2. Hormones and Hardwiring 3. Making Sense of Brain Organization Studies 4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Brain Organization 5. Working Backward from “Distinct‘ Groups 6. Masculine and Feminine Sexuality 7. Sexual Orienteering 8. Sex-Typed Interests 9. Taking Context Seriously 10. Trading Essence for Potential.

Although COVID-19 vaccines are free and readily available in the United States, many healthcare workers remain unvaccinated, potentially exposing their patients to a life-threatening pathogen. This paper reviews the ethical and legal factors surrounding patient requests to limit their care teams exclusively to vaccinated providers. Key factors that shape policy in this area include patient autonomy, the rights of healthcare workers, and the duties of healthcare institutions. Hospitals must also balance the rights of interested parties in the context of logistical (...) constraints, equity, and public health considerations. (shrink)

The emergence of nanotechnology, and specifically nanobiotechnology, raises major oversight challenges. In the United States, government, industry, and researchers are debating what oversight approaches are most appropriate. Among the federal agencies already embroiled in discussion of oversight approaches are the Food and Drug Administration , Environmental Protection Agency , Department of Agriculture , Occupational Safety and Health Administration , and National Institutes of Health . All can learn from assessment of the successes and failures of past oversight efforts aimed at (...) emerging technologies. This article reports on work funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at learning the lessons of past oversight efforts. The article offers insights that emerge from comparing five oversight case studies that examine oversight of genetically engineered organisms in the food supply, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, chemicals in the workplace, and gene therapy. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors present a new way of evaluating oversight. (shrink)

We show, for each computable ordinal α and degree $\alpha > {0^{\left( \alpha \right)}}$, the existence of a torsion-free abelian group with proper α th jump degree α.

Based upon an attentive reading of Nietzsche’s writings and his reception among post-Nietzschean thinkers, this book argues that Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise constitutes a materialist metaphysics of pure becoming, of pure immanence and the power of the virtual.

Grigorieff showed that forcing to add a subset of ω using partial functions with suitably chosen domains can add a generic real of minimal degree. We show that forcing with partial functions to add a subset of an uncountable κ without adding a real never adds a generic of minimal degree. This is in contrast to forcing using branching conditions, as shown by Brown and Groszek.

The purpose of this special issue and the conference that inspired it was to address the issue of conceptual integration in a science of consciousness. We felt this to be important, for while current efforts to scientifically investigate consciousness are taking place in an interdisciplinary context, it often seems as though the very terms being used to sustain a sense of interdisciplinary cooperation are working against it. This is because it is this very array of common concepts that generates a (...) sense of unity among consciousness researchers, despite the fact the concepts mean different things in different disciplines. These Concepts of Consciousness include the following: realism, representation, intentionality, information, control, memory and self. Given this list, we believed we could best approach the issue of potential conceptual integration by addressing each concept from different perspectives and asking the following: how do uses of the concept differ, must these meanings be synthesized in order for there to be a unified science of consciousness, is a unified conceptual scheme necessary to establish an independent science of consciousness, is a unified conceptual scheme possible, if it is not possible, why not, and if it is possible, what might it look like? To this end we invited, for each concept, two scholars who made extensive use of the identified concept in their work. The papers entailed in this special issue constitute the outcome of this effort, and in what follows we offer a brief examination of possible forms of integration the papers seem to collectively suggest. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...) as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum. (shrink)

We examined the “othering” of Asian Americans in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given past evidence that pathogen-related threat perceptions can exacerbate intergroup biases, as well as salient public narratives blaming the Chinese for the pandemic, we assessed whether individuals experiencing a greater sense of threat during the pandemic were more likely to apply the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype to Asian Americans. Over a seven-week period, we recruited 1,323 White Americans to complete a measure of the perceived Americanness of Asian, (...) Black, and White targets. Asian targets were consistently perceived as less American than White targets, across variations in subjective health threat and regional case counts. The direct and indirect connections of political ideology to the observed patterns were examined, revealing that White participants who blamed China for the pandemic were more likely to apply the perpetual foreigner stereotype to Asian Americans. These results indicate that the othering of Asian Americans is pervasive among White Americans and that variables related to social conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic can predict the potency of this association. (shrink)

The freedom to choose for oneself is a part of what it means to be a human being.Jackson J In England and Wales, the Mental Capacity Act 20...

D. H. M. Brooks; III*—Dogs and Slaves: Genetics, Exploitation and Morality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 31–6.

This critical note responds to Guiaşu and Tindale’s “Logical fallacies and invasion biology,” from our perspective as ecologists and philosophers of science engaged in debates about invasion biology and invasive species. We agree that “the level of charges and dismissals” surrounding these debates might be “unhealthy” and that “it will be very difficult for dialogues to move forward unless genuine attempts are made to understand the positions being held and to clarify the terms involved.” Although they raise several important scientific, (...) conceptual, and ethical issues at the foundations of invasion biology, we believe Guiaşu and Tindale’s attempts to clarify the debate were unsuccessful. Like some other critics of the field, they tend to misrepresent invasion biology by cherry-picking and constructing “straw people,” inaccurately portraying invasion biology, and thus failing to elevate the dialogue. In this critique, we clarify areas in the invasion biology literature misrepresented by Guiaşu and Tindale. We attempt to provide a more balanced view of areas of reasonable debate within invasion biology, including disputes about empirical evidence, diverse risk attitudes, and other diverse ethical commitments. (shrink)

Kinship terminologies are basic cognitive semantic systems that all human societies use for organizing kin relations. Diversity in kinship systems and their categories is substantial, but constrained. Rácz, Passmore, and Jordan explore hypotheses about such constraints from learning theories and social pressures, testing the impact of a community‐size driven learning bottleneck against the social coordination demands of different kinds of marriage and resource systems.