The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial cross-national differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary with politicians’ sex: early findings indicate that, on average, female leaders seem more focused on minimizing direct human suffering caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while male leaders implement (...) riskier short-term decisions, possibly aiming to minimize economic disruptions. These sex differences are consistent with broader findings in psychology, reflecting women’s stronger empathy, higher pathogen disgust, health concern, care-taking orientation, and dislike for the suffering of other people—as well as men’s higher risk-taking, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and focus on financial indicators of success and status. This review article contextualizes sex differences in pandemic leadership in an evolutionary framework. Evolution by natural selection is the only known process in nature that organizes organisms into higher degrees of functional order, or counteracts the unavoidable disorder that would otherwise ensue, and is therefore essential for explaining the origins of human sex differences. Differential sexual selection and parental investment between males and females, together with the sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain, drive sex differences in cognition and behavioral dispositions, underlying men’s and women’s leadership styles and decision-making during a global pandemic. According to thesexually dimorphic leadership specialization hypothesis, general psychobehavioral sex differences have been exapted during human evolution to create sexually dimorphic leadership styles. They may be facultatively co-opted by societies and/or followers when facing different kinds of ecological and/or sociopolitical threats, such as disease outbreaks or intergroup aggression. Early evidence indicates that against the invisible viral foe that can bring nations to their knees, the strategic circumspection of empathic feminine health “worriers” may bring more effective and humanitarian outcomes than the devil-may-care incaution of masculine risk-taking “warriors”. (shrink)

This article gives an analysis of Foucault’s studies of civil society and the various liberalist critiques of government. It follows from Foucault’s genealogical approach that “civil society” does not in itself possess any form of transcendental existence; its historical reality must be seen as the result of the productive nature of the power-knowledge-matrices. Foucault emphasizes that modern governmentality—and more specifically the procedures he names “the conduct of conduct”—is not exercised through coercive power and domination, but is dependent on the freedom (...) and activeness of individuals and groups of society. Civil society is thus analyzed as fundamentally ambivalent: on the one hand civil society is a field where different kinds of technologies of governance meet the lives and wills of groups and individuals, but on the other hand it is a potential field of what Foucault called ‘counter-conduct’ – for both collective action and individual political action. (shrink)

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability. During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens more (...) opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities. (shrink)

Eating disorders are evolutionarily novel conditions that lead to some of the highest mortality rates of all psychiatric disorders. Several evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed for eating disorders, but only the intrasexual competition hypothesis is extensively supported by evidence. We present the mismatch hypothesis as a necessary extension to the current theoretical framework of eating disorders. This hypothesis explains the evolutionarily novel adaptive metaproblem that has arisen when mating motives and readily available food rewards conflict with one another. This situation (...) is exacerbated in contemporary environments characterized by sedentary lifestyles, caloric surplus and the ubiquity of social comparisons that take place via social media. Our psychoneuroimmunological model connects ultimate-level causation with proximate mechanisms by showing how the adaptive metaproblem between mating motives and food rewards leads to chronic stress and, further, to disordered eating. Chronic stress causes neuroinflammation, which increases susceptibility to OCD-like behaviors that typically co-occur with eating disorders. Chronic stress upregulates the serotonergic system and causes dysphoric mood in patients with restricting-type anorexia nervosa. Dieting, however, reduces serotonin levels and dysphoric mood, leading to a vicious serotonergic-homeostatic stress/starvation cycle whereby cortisol and neuroinflammation increase through stringent dieting. Between-individual and within-individual variation in eating disorders partially arises from (co)variation in gut microbiota and stress responsivity, which influence neuroinflammation and the serotonergic system. In binge-related eating disorders, even a short period of fasting drops serotonin levels, a state alleviated by binge eating. Eating disorder treatments should aim to reduce the chronic stress, neuroinflammation, stress responsivity and gut dysbiosis that fuel the disorders. We review the advances that have been made in recent years in understanding how to best treat eating disorders, outlining directions for future clinical research. Connecting ultimate causes with proximate mechanisms and treating biopsychosocial causes rather than manifest symptoms will enable more effective and sophisticated long-term interventions for the millions of people who suffer from eating disorders. (shrink)

Background: There is evidence that household point-of-use water treatment products can reduce the enormous burden of water-borne illness. Nevertheless, adoption among the global poor is very low, and little evidence exists on why. Methods: We gave 600 households in poor communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh randomly-ordered two-month free trials of four water treatment products: dilute liquid chlorine, sodium dichloroisocyanurate tablets, a combined flocculant-disinfectant powdered mixture, and a silver-coated ceramic siphon filter. Consumers also received education on the dangers of untreated drinking water. (...) We measured which products consumers used with self-reports, observation, and chlorine tests. We also measured drinking water's contamination with E. coli. Findings: Households reported highest usage of the filter, although no product had even 30% usage. E. coli concentrations in stored drinking water were generally lowest when households had Water Guard. Households that self-reported product usage had large reductions in E. coli concentrations with any product as compared to controls. Conclusion: Traditional arguments for the low adoption of POU products focus on affordability, consumers' lack of information about germs and the dangers of unsafe water, and specific products not meshing with a household's preferences. In this study we provided free trials, repeated informational messages explaining the dangers of untreated water, and a variety of product designs. The low usage of all products despite such efforts makes clear that important barriers exist beyond cost, information, and variation among these four product designs. Without a better understanding of the choices and aspirations of the target end-users, household-based water treatment is unlikely to reduce morbidity and mortality substantially in urban Bangladesh and similar populations. © 2011 Luoto et al. (shrink)

We present data from 122 nations showing that Baumard's argument on the ecological predictors of life history strategies and innovation is incomplete. Our analyses indicate that wealth, parasite stress, and cold climate impose orthogonal effects on life histories, innovation, and industrialization. Baumard also overlooks the historical exploitation of other nations which significantly enlarged the “pooled energy budget” available to England.

Psychological sex differences have been studied scientifically for more than a century, yet linguists still debate about the existence, magnitude, and causes of such differences in language use. Advances in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shown the importance of sex and sexual orientation for various psychobehavioural traits, but the extent to which such differences manifest in language use is largely unexplored. Using computerised text analysis, this study found substantial psycholinguistic sexual dimorphism in a large corpus of English-language novels by heterosexual (...) authors. The psycholinguistic sex differences largely aligned with known psychological sex differences, such as empathising–systemising, people–things orientation, and men’s more pronounced spatial cognitive styles and abilities. Furthermore, consistent with predictions from cognitive neuroscience, novels by lesbian authors showed minor signs of psycholinguistic masculinisation, while novels by homosexual men had a female-typical psycholinguistic pattern, supporting the gender shift hypothesis of homosexuality. The findings on this large corpus of 66.9 million words indicate how psychological group differences based on sex and sexual orientation manifest in language use in two centuries of literary art. (shrink)

"Outoa tässä olemisen ajattelussa on sen yksinkertaisuus". Näin totesi Martin Heidegger omasta työstään. Heidegger – Ajattelun aiheita kokoaa suomalaisten tutkijoiden kirjoituksia Heideggerin avaamilla poluilla. Kokoelma piirtää Heideggerin haastavasta ja syvällisestä ajattelusta rikkaan ja moni-ilmeisen kuvan, joka soveltuu niin tutkijoiden kuin filosofian harrastajienkin käyttöön. Teos on ensimmäinen kattava kokoelma suomalaista Heidegger-tutkimusta. Kirja sisältää myös toimittajien johdatuksen Heideggeriin ja katsauksen aiheen historiaan Suomessa.

In clinical research scientific, legal as well as ethical aspects are important. It is well known that clinical investigators at university hospitals have to undertake their PhD-studies alongside their daily work and reconciling work and study can be challenging. The aim of this project was to create a web based course in clinical research bioethics (5 credits) and to examine whether the method is suitable for teaching bioethics. The course comprised of six modules: an initial examination (to assess knowledge in (...) bioethics), information on research legislation, obtaining permissions from authorities, writing an essay on research ethics, preparing one’s own study protocol, and a final exam. All assignments were designed with an idea of supporting students to reflect on their learning with their own research. (shrink)

The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions provides an international policy lens for analysing broad debates on issues of cultural globalization and development. The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume offer a fresh understanding of these key issues whilst examining cultural globalization, which is conceived in terms of artistic expressions and entertainment industries and interpreted anthropologically as the rituals, symbols, and practices of everyday life. The broad gamut of theories, methods, and evidence collected (...) by the editors outlines UNESCO's accomplishments, shortcomings, and future policy prospects. This edited collection has a clear message: The Convention is a useful and important instrument in the debate on cultural diversity, but not broad enough or sufficient to confront major challenges concerning human rights, sustainability, and cultural diversity as a whole. (shrink)

Book review of Martin Heidegger, Perusteen periaate [Der Satz vom Grund], translated into Finnish by Miika Luoto (Helsinki: Teos, 2018).