In recent years, it has become commonplace among the Global Burden of Disease study authors to regard the disability-adjusted life year primarily as a descriptive health metric. During the first phase of the GBD, it was widely acknowledged that the DALY had built-in evaluative assumptions. However, from the publication of the 2010 GBD and onwards, two central evaluative practices—time discounting and age-weighting—have been omitted from the DALY model. After this substantial revision, the emerging view now appears to be that the (...) DALY is primarily a descriptive measure. Our aim in this article is to argue that the DALY, despite changes, remains largely evaluative. Our analysis focuses on the understanding of the DALY by comparing the DALY as a measure of disease burden in the two most significant phases of GBD publications, from their beginning to the most recent releases. We identify numerous assumptions underlying the DALY and group them as descriptive or evaluative. We conclude that while the DALY model arguably has become more descriptive, it remains, by necessity, largely evaluative. (shrink)

Models not only represent but may also influence their targets in important ways. While models’ abilities to influence outcomes has been studied in the context of economic models, often under the label ‘performativity’, we argue that this phenomenon also pertains to epidemiological models, such as those used for forecasting the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic. After identifying three ways in which a model by the Covid-19 Response Team at Imperial College London may have influenced scientific advice, policy, and individual responses, (...) we consider the implications of epidemiological models’ performative capacities. We argue, first, that performativity may impair models’ ability to successfully predict the course of an epidemic; but second, that it may provide an additional sense in which these models can be successful, namely by changing the course of an epidemic. (shrink)

How could the initial, drastic decisions to implement “lockdowns” to control the spread of COVID-19 infections be justifiable, when they were made on the basis of such uncertain evidence? We defend the imposition of lockdowns in some countries by first, and focusing on the UK, looking at the evidence that undergirded the decision, second, arguing that this provided us with sufficient grounds to restrict liberty given the circumstances, and third, defending the use of poorly-empirically-constrained epidemiological models as tools that can (...) legitimately guide public policy. (shrink)

When do probability distribution functions (PDFs) about future climate misrepresent uncertainty? How can we recognise when such misrepresentation occurs and thus avoid it in reasoning about or communicating our uncertainty? And when we should not use a PDF, what should we do instead? In this paper we address these three questions. We start by providing a classification of types of uncertainty and using this classification to illustrate when PDFs misrepresent our uncertainty in a way that may adversely affect decisions. We (...) then discuss when it is reasonable and appropriate to use a PDF to reason about or communicate uncertainty about climate. We consider two perspectives on this issue. On one, which we argue is preferable, available theory and evidence in climate science basically excludes using PDFs to represent our uncertainty. On the other, PDFs can legitimately be provided when resting on appropriate expert judgement and recognition of associated risks. Once we have specified the border between appropriate and inappropriate uses of PDFs, we explore alternatives to their use. We briefly describe two formal alternatives, namely imprecise probabilities and possibilistic distribution functions, as well as informal possibilistic alternatives. We suggest that the possibilistic alternatives are preferable. -/- . (shrink)

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical (...) icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations. (shrink)

"Empirische Ästhetik hat heute Konjunktur. Doch sie ist keineswegs eine Erfindung der Gegenwart. Schon im späten 19. Jahrhundert wurden zahlreiche Versuche unternommen, wissenschaftlich exakte Methoden in die Untersuchung des Schönen einzuführen. Unter Anschluss an Disziplinen wie Physiologie, Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft wird Ästhetik um 1900 zu einer Wissensform, die in ihren materiellen Grundlagen, in ihrer diskursiven Organisation sowie in ihren theoretischen Konsequenzen neuartige Verbindungen zwischen Gefühl und Genauigkeit erzeugt. Die Beiträge des Bandes diskutieren diese Entwicklung anhand verschiedener Facetten und Spielformen empirischer (...) Ästhetik, die von den frühen Einfühlungstheorien über experimentelle Laborforschungen bis hin zu Poetik und Kunstwissenschaft reichen."--Front inside flap of dust jacket. (shrink)

In a recent paper— The disvalue of death in the global burden of disease 1—we question the commensurability of the two components of the disability-adjusted life year — years lived with disability and years of life lost —and offer a tentative solution to this problem. In an exciting and constructive reply— Is consistency overrated? 2—philosopher S Andrew Schroeder argues that our concern about the DALY may be missing the mark by accepting the DALY as what he refers to as an (...) index reflecting nothing ‘beyond the importance we place in each ’. According to Schroeder, our consistency requirement is then made redundant. Recall our main argument: the DALY is the arithmetical sum of two components, YLDs and YLLs. The YLDs represents the individual disease burden that occurs while we are alive, while YLLs represents the individual disease burden resulting from our death. ‘Death’, in this context, is not the process of dying, which happens within life and which is captured by YLDs, but rather the incidence in which the life of a person has ended. Understood this way, the DALY is the aggregate of life and death, and we argue that these are incommensurables. Why are YLDs and YLLs incommensurables? In our article, we present several reasons for this. Briefly, YLDs measure disease burden that happens to an individual, whether it be painful experiences or loss of function. YLDs have a duration and are usually something we experience, such as pain. YLLs, on the other hand, are instantly generated when the life of that individual has expired. We do not experience YLLs, and they happen where we are not. When YLLs are generated, the life in question has already ended. On a secular account, death is the irreversible cessation of the mind and the senses, and …. (shrink)

As models of living beings acting in a real world biorobots undergo an accelerated “philogenic” complexification. The first efficient robots performed simple animal behaviours (e.g., those of ants, crickets) and later on isolated elementary behaviours of complex beings. The increasing complexity of the tasks robots are dedicated to is matched by an increasing complexity and versatility of the architectures now supporting conditioning or even elementary planning.

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

This daily diary study examined the within-person coupling between four emotion regulation strategies and both subjective well-being and perceived stress in daily life of geriatric nurses. Participants (N = 89) described how they regulated their emotions in terms of cognitive reappraisal and suppression. They also indicated their subjective well-being and level of perceived stress each day over three weeks. At the within-person level, cognitive reappraisal intended to increase positive emotions was positively associated with higher subjective well-being and negatively associated with (...) perceived stress. Suppression of the expression of positive emotions was negatively associated with subjective well-being and positively associated with perceived stress. However, cognitive reappraisal intended to down-regulate negative emotions and suppression as a strategy to inhibit the expression of negative emotions were not associated with daily well-being or perceived stress. Off-days were rated as days with higher subjective well-being and lower perceived stress in contrast to working days. At the between-person level, individuals who reported more daily negative affect reported increased suppression of positive emotions, corroborating the within-person findings. Moreover, findings indicated that nurses with more years of experience in the job reported higher subjective well-being and less perceived stress. These results provide insights into important daily emotional processes of geriatric nurses, both at workdays and in their leisure time. (shrink)

Ontology is one strategy for promoting interoperability of heterogeneous data through consistent tagging. An ontology is a controlled structured vocabulary consisting of general terms (such as “cell” or “image” or “tissue” or “microscope”) that form the basis for such tagging. These terms are designed to represent the types of entities in the domain of reality that the ontology has been devised to capture; the terms are provided with logical defi nitions thereby also supporting reasoning over the tagged data. Aim: This (...) paper provides a survey of the biomedical imaging ontologies that have been developed thus far. It outlines the challenges, particularly faced by ontologies in the fields of histopathological imaging and image analysis, and suggests a strategy for addressing these challenges in the example domain of quantitative histopathology imaging. The ultimate goal is to support the multiscale understanding of disease that comes from using interoperable ontologies to integrate imaging data with clinical and genomics data. (shrink)

Definition of the problemThe upcoming reforms according to the specifications of the Master Plan 2020 provide for a competency-oriented restructuring of medical studies. This article aims to develop perspectives on how teaching ethics in medical studies can be more strongly oriented at building competencies. In this way, it pursues the goal of making the concept of competency more tangible for medical ethics and usable for the design of medical ethics education.ArgumentsWe understand competencies as dispositions for actions that enable problem solving. (...) By transferring the concept of moral intelligence to the moral actions of physicians in patient care, we specify five ethical–moral competencies that must be present for morally appropriate, ethically reflected actions by future physicians: (1) the ability to form a professional moral compass, (2) the willingness to align oneself with professional ethical norms and values, (3) the ability to perceive moral dimensions of medical action, (4) the ability to make moral judgments based on ethical considerations about the right action, and (5) the willingness to realize ethically justified action. We illustrate their importance for teaching medical ethics using the example of teaching clinical ethics in medical studies.ConclusionOur conceptualization of moral–ethical competencies can be used to design concrete courses in a competency-oriented way. Our approach could be applied analogously to other areas of teaching ethics in health care. (shrink)

The proliferation of digital devices in educational settings has contributed to the decentralization of knowledge from teachers and established textbooks to fluid online personalized resources, and...

Conveying emotions in spoken poetry may be based on a poem’s semantic content and/or on emotional prosody, i.e. on acoustic features above single speech sounds. However, hypotheses of more direct sound–emotion relations in poetry, such as those based on the frequency of occurrence of certain phonemes, have not withstood empirical (re)testing. Therefore, we investigated sound–emotion associations based on prosodic features as a potential alternative route for the, at least partially, non-semantic expression and perception of emotions in poetry. We first conducted (...) a pre-study designed to validate relevant parameters of joy- and sadness-supporting prosody in the recitation, i.e. acoustic production, of poetry. The parameters obtained thereof guided the experimental modification of recordings of German joyful and sad poems such that for each poem, three prosodic variants were constructed: one with a joy-supporting prosody, one with a sadness-supporting prosody, and a neutral variant. In the subsequent experiment, native German speakers and participants with no command of German rated the joyfulness and sadness of these three variants. This design allowed us to investigate the role of emotional prosody, operationalized in terms of sound-emotion parameters, both in combination with and dissociated from semantic access to the emotional content of the poems. The findings from our pre-study showed that the emotional content of poems (based on pre-classifications into joyful and sad) indeed predicted the prosodic features pitch and articulation rate. The subsequent perception experiment revealed that cues provided by joyful and sad prosody specifically affect non-German-speaking listeners’ emotion ratings of the poems. Thus, the present investigation lends support to the hypothesis of prosody-based iconic relations between perceived emotion and sound qualia. At the same time, our findings also highlight that semantic access substantially decreases the role of cross-language sound–emotion associations and indicate that non-German-speaking participants may also use phonetic and prosodic cues other than the ones that were targeted and manipulated here. (shrink)

The study of similarity is fundamental to biological inquiry. Many homology concepts have been formulated that function successfully to explain similarity in their native domains, but fail to provide an overarching account applicable to variably interconnected and independent areas of biological research despite the monistic standpoint from which they originate. The use of multiple, explicitly articulated homology concepts, applicable at different levels of the biological hierarchy, allows a more thorough investigation of the nature of biological similarity. Responsible epistemological pluralism as (...) advocated herein is generative of fruitful and innovative biological research, and is appropriate given the metaphysical pluralism that underpins all of biology. (shrink)

In the Global Burden of Disease study, disease burden is measured as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). The paramount assumption of the DALY is that it makes sense to aggregate years lived with disability (YLDs) and years of life lost (YLLs). However, this is not smooth sailing. Whereas morbidity (YLD) is something thathappens toan individual, loss of life itself (YLL) occurs when that individual’s life has ended. YLLs quantify something that involves no experience and does not take place among living individuals. (...) This casts doubt on whether the YLL is an individual burden at all. If not, then YLDs and YLLs are incommensurable. There are at least three responses to this problem, only one of which is tenable: a counterfactual account of harm. Taking this strategy necessitates a re-examination of how we count YLLs, particularly at the beginning of life. (shrink)

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized (...) in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

Service-Robotic—mainly defined as “non-industrial robotics”—is identified as the next economical success story to be expected after robots have been ubiquitously implemented into industrial production lines. Under the heading of service-robotic, we found a widespread area of applications reaching from robotics in agriculture and in the public transportation system to service robots applied in private homes. We propose for our interdisciplinary perspective of technology assessment to take the human user/worker as common focus. In some cases, the user/worker is the effective subject (...) acting by means of and in cooperation with a service robot; in other cases, the user/worker might become a pure object of the respective robotic system, for example, as a patient in a hospital. In this paper, we present a comprehensive interdisciplinary framework, which allows us to scrutinize some of the most relevant applications of service robotics; we propose to combine technical, economical, legal, philosophical/ethical, and psychological perspectives in order to design a thorough and comprehensive expert-based technology assessment. This allows us to understand the potentials as well as the limits and even the threats connected with the ongoing and the planned implementation of service robots into human lifeworld—particularly of those technical systems displaying increasing grades of autonomy. (shrink)

Psychometrically sound instruments that assess temporal dynamics of creative abilities are limited. The Ambulatory Battery of Creativity is designed to assess creative ideation performance multiple times in everyday life and was proven to capture the intra-individual dynamic of creative abilities reliably and validly. The present ambulatory study aimed to replicate and extend the psychometric evidence of the novel ABC. Sixty-nine participants worked on the ABC during a 5-day ambulatory assessment protocol. Each day, participants completed six randomly presented items of the (...) verbal and the figural ABC. Matching previous psychometric analyses, the results indicated good between-person and good within-person reliability. Furthermore, evidence for between-person and within-person validity of the ABC was obtained. Performance in the verbal and the figural ABC were interrelated and correlated with an independent measure of creative potential. The verbal ABC was further associated with openness, self-reported creative behavior, creative activities, and creative achievements, thus providing additional evidence of construct validity, especially for the verbal ABC. Finally, the verbal and the figural ABC yielded convincing within-person validity: Longer response times and higher subjective originality ratings were associated with more original ideas. This replication and extension of the ABC’s psychometric properties indicates that it enables a reliable and valid assessment of moment-to-moment fluctuations of creative ideation abilities in everyday life, which may facilitate the investigation of exciting new research questions related to dynamic aspects of creative ability. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to test the two-component theory of news selection. Its components are news factors included in articles and news values of news factors. It is assumed that news factors have different news values for various media outlets. The theory was tested comparing the empirical with the theoretical newsworthiness of news stories. First, news values of five news factors for national quality papers, regional papers, and tabloids were identified. Then, based on theory, the theoretical newsworthiness of (...) news stories was calculated. The independent variables were the news factors included in these articles and the news values of these news factors. In addition, in a laboratory setting, the empirical newsworthiness of the news stories was measured. Finally, measured newsworthiness was compared to the predicted one. Results confirmed the two-component theory and demonstrated that the chances of news stories to get published can be predicted by news factors and their news values. (shrink)

As philosophers of mind we seem to hold in common no very clear view about the relevance that work in psychology or the neurosciences may or may not have to our own favourite questions—even if we call the subject ‘philosophical psychology’. For example, in the literature we find articles on pain some of which do, some of which don't, rely more or less heavily on, for example, the work of Melzack and Wall; the puzzle cases used so extensively in discussions (...) of personal identity are drawn sometimes from the pleasant exercise of scientific fantasy, at times from surprising reports of scientific fact; and there are those who deny, as well as those who affirm, the importance of the discovery of rapid-eye-movement sleep to the philosophical treatment of dreaming. A general account of the relation between scientific, and philosophical, psychology is long overdue and of the first importance. Here I shall limit myself to just one area where the two seem to connect, discussing one type of neuropsychological research and its relevance to questions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

In recent years, multifetal pregnancy reduction (MFPR) has increasingly been the subject of debate in Norway, and the intensity reached a tentative maximum when Legislation Department delivered the interpretative statement § 2 - Interpretation of the Abortion Act in 2016 in response to the Ministry of Health (2014) requesting the Legislation Department to consider whether the Law on abortion allows for MFPR of healthy fetuses in multiple pregnancies. The Legislation Department concluded that current abortion laws allow MFPR within the framework (...) the law otherwise stipulates. The debate has not subsided, and during autumn 2018, it was further intensified in connection with the Christian Democrat "crossroads" and signals from the Conservatives to consider removing §2.3c and to forbid MFPR. -/- Many of the arguments in the MFPR debate appear seemingly similar to arguments pending in the general abortion debate, and an analysis of what sets MFPR apart from other abortions is wanting. The aim of this article is, therefore, to examine whether there is a moral distinction between abortion and MFPR of healthy fetuses. We will cover the typical arguments of the Norwegian debate, and highlight them with scholarly articles from the literature. The most important arguments against MFPR that we have identified we have dubbed the harm argument, slippery-slope argument, intent argument, grief argument, psychological long-term effects for the woman and sorting argument. We conclude that counter-arguments do not measure up in terms of detecting a morally relevant difference between MFPR of healthy fetuses and abortions. Our conclusion is therefore that—despite what several debaters seem to think—there is no morally relevant difference between the two. Therefore, when we allow abortion, we should also allow MFPR. (shrink)

In recent years, multifetal pregnancy reduction has increasingly been a subject of debate in Norway. The intensity of this debate reached a tentative maximum when the Legislation Department delivered their interpretative statement, Section 2 - Interpretation of the Abortion Act, in 2016 in response to a request from the Ministry of Health that the Legislation Department consider whether the Abortion Act allows for MFPR of healthy fetuses in multiple pregnancies. The Legislation Department concluded that the current abortion legislation [as of (...) 2016] allows for MFPR subject to the constraints that the law otherwise stipulates. The debate has not subsided, and during autumn 2018 it was further intensified in connection with the Norwegian Christian Democratic "crossroads" policy and signals from the Conservatives to consider removing section 2.3c and to forbid MFPR. Many of the arguments in the MFPR debate are seemingly similar to arguments put forward in the general abortion debate, and an analysis to ascertain what distinguishes MFPR from other abortions has yet to be conducted. The aim of this article is, therefore, to examine whether there is a moral distinction between abortion and MFPR of healthy fetuses. We will cover the typical arguments emerging in the debate in Norway and exemplify them with scholarly articles from the literature. We have dubbed the most important arguments against MFPR that we have identified the harm argument, the slippery-slope argument, the intention argument, the grief argument, the long-term psychological effects for the woman argument, and the sorting argument. We conclude that these arguments do not measure up in terms of demonstrating a morally relevant difference between MFPR of healthy fetuses and other abortions. Our conclusion is, therefore — despite what several discussants seem to think — that there is no morally relevant difference between the two. Therefore, on the same conditions as we allow for abortions, we should also allow MFPR. Keywords: abortion, ethics, medical ethics, MFPR, selective MFPR. (shrink)

Die anstehenden Reformen des Medizinstudiums nach den Vorgaben des Masterplans 2020 sehen eine kompetenzorientierte Neustrukturierung des Medizinstudiums vor. Dieser Artikel zielt darauf ab, Perspektiven aufzuzeigen, wie der Ethik-Unterricht im Medizinstudium noch stärker kompetenzorientiert ausgerichtet werden kann. Er verfolgt damit das Ziel, den Kompetenzbegriff für die Medizinethik greifbarer und für die Gestaltung der Medizinethik-Lehre nutzbar zu machen. Kompetenzen verstehen wir als Handlungsdispositionen, die zur Problemlösung befähigen. Durch Übertragung des Konzepts der moralischen Intelligenz auf das moralische Handeln von Ärzt:innen in der Patient:innenversorgung (...) spezifizieren wir fünf ethisch-moralische Kompetenzen, die für moralisch angemessenes, ethisch reflektiertes professionelles Handeln angehender Ärzt:innen angelegt sein müssen: 1.) die Fähigkeit zur Ausgestaltung eines professionellen moralischen Kompasses, 2.) die Ausrichtungsbereitschaft an professionsethischen Normen und Werten, 3.) die Fähigkeit zur Wahrnehmung moralischer Dimensionen ärztlichen Handelns, 4.) die Fähigkeit zum moralischen Urteilen anhand ethischer Überlegungen über das richtige Handeln und 5.) die Realisierungsbereitschaft ethisch begründeten Handelns. Wir illustrieren ihre Bedeutung für die Medizinethik-Lehre am Beispiel des Unterrichts zur Ethik der Patient:innenversorgung im Medizinstudium. Unsere Konzeptualisierung ethisch-moralischer Kompetenzen kann dazu verwendet werden, konkrete Lehrangebote kompetenzorientiert auszugestalten. Unser Vorgehen kann analog auf andere Bereiche der Lehre von Ethik im Gesundheitswesen übertragen werden. (shrink)

Research on the relation between sound and meaning in language has reported substantial evidence for implicit associations between articulatory–acoustic characteristics of phonemes and emotions. In the present study, we specifically tested the relation between the acoustic properties of a text and its emotional tone as perceived by readers. To this end, we asked participants to assess the emotional tone of single stanzas extracted from a large variety of poems. The selected stanzas had either an extremely high, a neutral, or an (...) extremely low average formant dispersion. To assess the average formant dispersion per stanza, all words were phonetically transcribed and the distance between the first and second formant per vowel was calculated. Building on a long tradition of research on associations between sound frequency on the one hand and non‐acoustic concepts such as size, strength, or happiness on the other hand, we hypothesized that stanzas with an extremely high average formant dispersion would be rated lower on items referring to Potency (dominance) and higher on items referring to Activity (arousal) and Evaluation (emotional valence). The results confirmed our hypotheses for the dimensions of Potency and Evaluation, but not for the dimension of Activity. We conclude that, at least in poetic language, extreme values of acoustic features of vowels are a significant predictor for the emotional tone of a text. (shrink)

In vowel discrimination, commonly found discrimination patterns are directional asymmetries where discrimination is faster if differing vowels are presented in a certain sequence compared to the reversed sequence. Different models of speech sound processing try to account for these asymmetries based on either phonetic or phonological properties. In this study, we tested and compared two of those often-discussed models, namely the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon model and the Natural Referent Vowel framework. While most studies presented isolated vowels, we investigated a large (...) stimulus set of German vowels in a more naturalistic setting within minimal pairs. We conducted an mismatch negativity study in a passive and a reaction time study in an active oddball paradigm. In both data sets, we found directional asymmetries that can be explained by either phonological or phonetic theories. While behaviorally, the vowel discrimination was based on phonological properties, both tested models failed to explain the found neural patterns comprehensively. Therefore, we additionally examined the influence of a variety of articulatory, acoustical, and lexical factors but also the influence of factors beyond the well-known in depth via multiple regression analyses. The analyses revealed that the perceptual factor of perceived loudness has a greater impact than considered in the literature and should be taken stronger into consideration when analyzing preattentive natural vowel processing. (shrink)

Despite the intrinsic complexity of integrating individual, social and technologically supported intelligence, the paper proposes a relatively simple ‘connectionist’ framework for conceptualizing distributed cognitive systems. Shared information sources (documents) are represented as nodes connected by links of variable strength, which increases as the documents co-occur in the usage patterns. This learning procedure captures and exploits its users’ implicit knowledge to help them find relevant information, thus supporting an unconscious form of exchange. These principles are applied to a concrete problem domain: (...) architects sharing design knowledge through a database of associatively connected building projects. (shrink)

In “Agreeing to Disagree” [1], Robert Aumann proves that a group of agents who once agreed about the probability of some proposition for which their current probabilities are common knowledge must still agree, even if those probabilities reflect disparate observations. Perhaps one saw that a card was red and another saw that it was a heart, so that as far as that goes, their common prior probability of 1/52 for its being the Queen of hearts would change in the one (...) case to 1/26, and in the other to 1/13. But if those are indeed their current probabilities, it cannot be the case that both know them, and both know that both know them, etc., etc. (shrink)

It has become increasingly common to conduct research on popular views on ethical questions. In this paper, we discuss when and to what extent popular views should be included in a reflective equilibrium process, thereby influencing normative theory. We argue that popular views are suitable for inclusion in a reflective equilibrium if they approximate considered judgments and examine some factors that plausibly contribute to the consideredness of popular views. We conclude that deliberation and familiarity contribute to the consideredness of popular (...) views, whereas prevalence does not. Furthermore, we raise the “fair trial” objection: that expert deliberation on popular views might fail to respect the consideredness of these views. Eliciting views approximating considered judgments directly from participants is therefore preferable to refining popular views or treating them as “bare” intuitions in the reflective process. These conclusions have important implications for which research methods will likely elicit popular views suitable for a reflective equilibrium process. Research focusing on the prevalence of views is unlikely to yield popular views suitable for a reflective equilibrium, whereas deliberative and in-depth work is more promising. (shrink)

In this paper we present findings from an experiment involving both scientists working at the nanoscale and philosophers interested in this emerging field of research. Early career scientists working at the nanoscale were asked to read, discuss and debate two examples of philosophy of science that had been written with a specific focus on nanoscale science and technology. The papers that our participating scientists were asked to read were one by Jan Schmidt and one by George Khushf. These papers are (...) interesting for comparative discussion because although both draw on similar cases to make their arguments, Schmidt argues that nanotechnology represents a new form of reductionism, while Khushf argues that the field represents a shift towards more systems-based approaches of understanding and acting. The initial aim of this experimental exercise was both to create a space for discussion and reflection, and to investigate the scientific literacy of emerging works in the philosophy of nanoscience. Interestingly, interdisciplinary interaction during the exercise saw unexpected topics of interest and discussion emerge. In discussing the two articles, the scientists participating in our exercise highlighted a range of questions that not only related to the scientific content of the philosophers' arguments, but also to the way in which they conducted and presented their research. This exercise demonstrates the added value and richness that can come from interdisciplinary interactions across the social and natural sciences and from iterative discussions across theory and practice, especially when focused on emerging fields of research such as that of nanoscience and technology. (shrink)

Research has suggested an increase in loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, but much of this work has been cross-sectional, making causal inferences difficult. In the present research, we employed a longitudinal design to identify loneliness trajectories within a period of twelve months during the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium (N = 2106). We were particularly interested in the potential protective role of self-compassion in these temporal dynamics. Using a group-based trajectory modelling approach, we identified trajectory groups of individuals following low (11.0%), (...) moderate-low (22.4%), moderate (25.7%), moderate-high (31.3%), and high (9.6%) levels of loneliness. Findings indicated that younger people, women, and individuals with poor quality relationships, high levels of health anxiety, and stress related to COVID-19, all had a higher probability of belonging to the highest loneliness trajectory groups. Importantly, we also found that people high in two of the three facets of self-compassion (self-kindness and common humanity) had a lower probability of belonging to the highest loneliness trajectory groups. Ultimately, we demonstrated that trajectory groups reflecting higher levels of loneliness were associated with lower life satisfaction and greater depressive symptoms. We discuss the possibility that increasing self-compassion may be used to promote better mental health in similarly challenging situations. (shrink)