Objectives To characterize recruitment approaches to research on the brain and mind that involves Indigenous peoples. Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of a Harding et al. (2021) scoping review. Reviewers screened studies (_n_ = 66) for sampling methods, recruitment and engagement, positionality statements, and details on ethics approvals. Synthesis We identified twenty-nine (29) English-language articles relevant to the analysis. Of these, 52% (_n_ = 15/29) reported a mix of sampling methods; 45% (_n_ = 13/29) contained statements or information about (...) author positionalities. While, overall, 24% (_n_ = 7/29) of the studies were missing information about ethics protocols, we observe an improvement over time in the reporting of approvals and use of community-engaged participant recruitment methods. Current brain research studies demonstrate ways of collaborating with Indigenous communities that meet existing ethics guidelines. To be wholly responsive to the needs of Indigenous peoples, however, researchers may need to exceed existing ethical benchmarks.. Positionality statements successfully detailed the relationships of the research teams with the communities with which they work, and contextualized recruitment methods. Conclusion Improved quality and meaningfulness of brain research with Indigenous peoples and trust in the research process and public health will be enhanced when remaining gaps in protecting and reporting of participant recruitment methods are closed. (shrink)

The idea that our conscious decisions determine our actions has been challenged by a report suggesting that the brain starts to prepare for a movement before the person concerned has consciously decided to move . Libet et al. claimed that their results show that our actions are not consciously initiated. The current article describes two experiments in which we attempted to replicate Libet et al.'s comparison of participants' movement-related brain activity with the reported times of their decisions to move and (...) also the reported times of their decisions of which hand to move. We also looked at the distribution of participants' reports over time to evaluate an alternative explanation of Libet et al.'s results. Although the Readiness Potential was usually present before all of the decisions to move, consistent with the findings of Keller and Heckhausen and Libet et al. , we found that many reported decision times were before the onset of the Lateralized Readiness Potential, which measures hand-specific movement preparation. The latter finding is consistent with the conclusion that the LRP always started after the conscious decision to move. We conclude that even though activity related to movement anticipation may be present before a conscious decision to move, the cortical preparation necessary for the movement to happen immediately may not start until after the conscious decision to move. (shrink)

Although a number of articles have addressed ethical perceptions and behaviors, few studies have examined ethics across cultures. This research focuses on measuring the job satisfaction, customer orientation, ethics, and ethical training of automotive salespersons in the U.S. and Taiwan. The relationships of these variables to salesperson performance were also investigated. Ethics training was found to be negatively related to perceived levels of ethicalness and performance. High performance U.S. salespeople reported high ethical behavior, while the opposite was true in Taiwan. (...) Customer orientation in both countries was influenced by ethics training. Managers should evaluate current ethics training programs to insure correct ethical behavior is taught and rewarded. (shrink)

Empirical research pertaining to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), clinician behaviors related to do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders and substituted judgment suggests potential contributions to medical ethics. Research quantifying the likelihood of surviving CPR points to the need for further philosophical analysis of the limitations of the patient autonomy in decision making, the nature and definition of medical futility, and the relationship between futility and professional standards. Research on DNR orders has identified barriers to the goal of patient involvement in these life and death (...) discussions. The initial data on surrogate decision making also points to the need for a reexamination of the moral basis for substituted judgment, the moral authority of proxy decision making and the second-order status of the best interests standard. These examples of empirical research suggest that an interplay between empirical research, ethical analysis and policy development may represent a new form of interdisciplinary scholarship to improve clinical medicine. (shrink)

In Australia research projects proposing the use of linked data require approval by a Human Research Ethics Committee . A sound evaluation of the ethical issues involved requires understanding of the basic mechanics of data linkage, the associated benefits and risks, and the legal context in which it occurs. The rapidly increasing number of research projects utilising linked data in Australia has led to an urgent need for enhanced capacity of HRECs to review research applications involving this emerging research methodology. (...) The training described in this article was designed to respond to an identified need among the data linkage units in the Australian Population Health Research Network and HREC members in Australia. (shrink)

Information is the fourth core element of public health legal preparedness and of legal preparedness for public health emergencies specifically. Clearly, the creation, transmittal, and application of information are vital to all public health endeavors. The critical significance of information grows exponentially as the complexity and scale of public threats increase.Only a small body of organized information on public health law existed before the 21st century: a series of landmark books published beginning in 1926 by Tobey, Grad, and Wing ; (...) model public health laws published as early as 1907; systematic reviews of original research studies published in the 1990s; and a small but growing number of articles published in public health journals and law reviews.With the new century came new public health law programs and activities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in public health professional associations, and in numerous non-profit and academic organizations. (shrink)

Information is the fourth core element of public health legal preparedness and of legal preparedness for public health emergencies specifically. Clearly, the creation, transmittal, and application of information are vital to all public health endeavors. The critical significance of information grows exponentially as the complexity and scale of public threats increase.Only a small body of organized information on public health law existed before the 21st century: a series of landmark books published beginning in 1926 by Tobey, Grad, and Wing ; (...) model public health laws published as early as 1907; systematic reviews of original research studies published in the 1990s; and a small but growing number of articles published in public health journals and law reviews.With the new century came new public health law programs and activities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in public health professional associations, and in numerous non-profit and academic organizations. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the complex forms of knowledge involved in diagnostic and interventional decision making by comparing the processes in medicine and nursing, including nurse practitioners. Many authors assert that the practice of clinical decision making involves the application of theoretical knowledge (acquired in the classroom and textbooks) as well as research evidence, upon concrete particular cases. This approach draws on various universal principles and algorithms to facilitate the task. On the other hand, others argue (...) that this involves an intuitive form of judgement that is difficult to teach, one that is acquired principally through experience. In an exploration of these issues, this article consists of three sections. A clarification of terms commonly used when discussing decision making is provided in the first section. In the second section, an epistemological analysis of decision making is presented by examining several perspectives and comparing them for their use in the nursing and medical literature. Bunge's epistemological framework for decision making (based on scientific realism) is explored for its fit with the aims of medicine and nursing. The final section presents a discussion of knowledge utilization and decision making as it relates to the implications for the education and ongoing development of nurse practitioners. It is concluded that Donald Schön's conception of reflective practice best characterizes the skilful conduct of clinical decision making. (shrink)

In _Sentient Flesh _R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty 'cause... us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as (...) music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiēsis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance of flesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way past the destructive force of ontology that still holds us in thrall. Erudite and capacious, _Sentient Flesh _offers a major intervention in the black study of life. (shrink)

Technological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic -- something we may welcome, or about which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops. General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology to society and different types of technology are examined: the technology of production: domestic and (...) reproductive technology; and military technology. The book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to show that production technology is shaped by social relations in the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated social science has tended to ignore or trivialise -- though these are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes the most frightening technology of all -- the technology of weaponry, especially nuclear weapons. The editors argue that social scientists have devoted disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society, and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking about the relationship between technology andsociety. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account new research and the emergence of new theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

Gamma rhythms are associated with external and internal sensory processing. Within the conceptual framework of “top-down” and “bottom-up” processing, this suggests that gamma represents a format common to both camps. As these oscillations facilitate communication in the temporal domain, they may represent a mechanism by which top-down and bottom-up processing can interact. A breakdown in this interaction may lead to hallucinations.

We study the viability domains of bio-economic constraints for fishing model of hermaphrodite population, displaying three stages, juvenile, female and male. The dynamic of this model is subject to two constraints: an ecological constraint ensuring the stock perennity, and an economic constraint ensuring a minimum revenue for fishermen. Using viability kernel, we find out a viability domain which simultaneously guarantees a minimum stock level and a minimum income for fleets.

Neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders, also sometimes referred to as psychosurgery, is rapidly evolving, with new techniques and indications being investigated actively. Many within the field have suggested that some form of guidelines or regulations are needed to help ensure that a promising field develops safely. Multiple countries have enacted specific laws regulating NPD. This article reviews NPD-specific laws drawn from North and South America, Asia and Europe, in order to identify the typical form and contents of these laws and to (...) set the groundwork for the design of an optimal regulation for the field. Key challenges for this design that are revealed by the review are how to define the scope of the law, what types of regulations are required, and how to approach international harmonization given the potential migration of researchers and patients. (shrink)

The ability to consider and analyze different stakeholder interests is a skill required of today’s business students. This paper describes a 35-minute experiential exercise using Tinkertoys® or Legos® to demonstrate and reinforce the concept of stakeholder management. The exercise, the Tower Building Challenge (TBC), is targeted toward classes in business ethics, strategy, or decision-making and requires students to work in groups to build a tower with the underpinning challenge that each group member has a different interest in how the tower (...) should be built. Student feedback reflects on the difficulty of satisfying all stakeholders when making business decisions, the importance of making the interests of stakeholders transparent to enhance cooperation and the effectiveness of the decision-making process, and the need for stakeholder management when considering business decisions that impact stakeholders. Following this experiential exercise, students’ preliminary understanding presents an opportunity for a deeper discussion of stakeholder management. Specifically, students are prompted to consider stakeholder interests as joint, rather than opposed, when engaged in stakeholder management. (shrink)

We are highly tuned to each other's visual attention. Perceiving the eye or hand movements of another person can influence the timing of a saccade or the reach of our own. However, the explanation for such spatial orienting in interpersonal contexts remains disputed. Is it due to the social appearance of the cue—a hand or an eye—or due to its social relevance—a cue that is connected to another person with attentional and intentional states? We developed an interpersonal version of the (...) Posner spatial cueing paradigm. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location, while interacting with an unseen partner. Participants were led to believe that the cue was either connected to the gaze location of their partner or was generated randomly by a computer (Experiment 1), and that their partner had higher or lower social rank while engaged in the same or a different task (Experiment 2). We found that spatial cue‐target compatibility effects were greater when the cue related to a partner's gaze. This effect was amplified by the partner's social rank, but only when participants believed their partner was engaged in the same task. Taken together, this is strong evidence in support of the idea that spatial orienting is interpersonally attuned to the social relevance of the cue—whether the cue is connected to another person, who this person is, and what this person is doing—and does not exclusively rely on the social appearance of the cue. Visual attention is not only guided by the physical salience of one's environment but also by the mental representation of its social relevance. (shrink)

From a twenty-first century partnership between bioethics and neuroscience, the modern field of neuroethics is emerging, and technologies enabling functional neuroimaging with unprecedented sensitivity have brought new ethical, social and legal issues to the forefront. Some issues, akin to those surrounding modern genetics, raise critical questions regarding prediction of disease, privacy and identity. However, with new and still-evolving insights into our neurobiology and previously unquantifiable features of profoundly personal behaviors such as social attitude, value and moral agency, the difficulty of (...) carefully and properly interpreting the relationship between brain findings and our own self-concept is unprecedented. Therefore, while the ethics of genetics provides a legitimate starting point - even a backbone - for tackling ethical issues in neuroimaging, they do not suffice. Drawing on recent neuroimaging findings and their plausible real-world applications, we argue that interpretation of neuroimaging data is a key epistemological and ethical challenge. This challenge is two-fold. First, at the scientific level, the sheer complexity of neuroscience research poses challenges for integration of knowledge and meaningful interpretation of data. Second, at the social and cultural level, we find that interpretations of imaging studies are bound by cultural and anthropological frameworks. In particular, the introduction of concepts of self and personhood in neuroimaging illustrates the interaction of interpretation levels and is a major reason why ethical reflection on genetics will only partially help settle neuroethical issues. Indeed, ethical interpretation of such findings will necessitate not only traditional bioethical input but also a wider perspective on the construction of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Benjamin Libet has argued that electrophysiological signs of cortical movement preparation are present before people report having made a conscious decision to move, and that these signs constitute evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. This controversial conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the electrophysiological signs recorded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl are associated only with preparation for movement. We tested that assumption by comparing the electrophysiological signs before a decision to move with signs present before a decision (...) not to move. There was no evidence of stronger electrophysiological signs before a decision to move than before a decision not to move, so these signs clearly are not specific to movement preparation. We conclude that Libet’s results do not provide evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. (shrink)

This article, which is intended both as a position paper in the philosophical debate on natural kinds and as the guest editorial to this thematic issue, takes up the challenge posed by Ian Hacking in his paper, “Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight.” Whereas a straightforward interpretation of that paper suggests that according to Hacking the concept of natural kinds should be abandoned, both in the philosophy of science and in philosophy more generally, we suggest that an alternative and less (...) fatalistic reading is also possible. We argue that abandoning the concept of natural kinds would be premature, as it still can do important work. Our concern is with the situation in the (philosophy of the) life sciences. Against the background of this concern we attempt to set something of an agenda for future research on the topic of natural kinds in the (philosophy of the) life sciences. (shrink)