Adolescence has been linked to an enhanced tolerance of uncertainty and risky behavior and is possibly connected to an increased response toward rewards. However, previous research has produced inconsistent findings. To investigate whether these findings are due to different reward probabilities used in the experimental design, we extended a monetary incentive delay task by including three different reward probabilities. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, 25 healthy adolescents and 22 adults were studied during anticipation of rewards in the VS. Differently colored (...) cue stimuli indicated either a monetary or verbal trial and symbolized different reward probabilities, to which the participants were blinded. Results demonstrated faster reaction times for lower reward probabilities in both age groups. Adolescents were slower through all conditions and had less activation on a neural level. Imaging results showed a three-way interaction between age group x condition x reward probability with differences in percent signal change between adolescents and adults for the high reward probabilities while adolescents demonstrated differences for the lowest. Therefore, previous inconsistent findings could be due to different reward probabilities, which makes examining these crucial for a better understanding of adolescent and adult behavior. (shrink)

We argue that Madole & Harden's distinction between shallow versus deep genetic causes can bring some clarity to causal claims arising from genome-wide association studies (GWASs). However, the authors argue that GWAS only finds shallow genetic causes, making GWAS commensurate with the environmental studies they hope to supplant. We also assess whether their distinction applies best to explanations or causes.

Affective variables have been shown to impact working memory and cognitive control. Theoretical arguments suggest that the functional impact of emotion on cognition might be mediated through shifting action dispositions related to changes in motivational orientation. The current study examined the effects of positive and negative affect on performance via direct manipulation of motivational state in tasks with high demands on cognitive control. Experiment 1 examined the effects of monetary reward on task-switching performance, while Experiment 2 examined the effects of (...) both rewards and punishments on working memory, using primary (liquid) reinforcers. In both experiments, dissociable trial-by-trial and contextual (block-related) enhancements of cognitive control during task performance were observed in relationship to motivational incentive value. Performance enhancements were equivalent in the reward and punishment conditions, but were differentially impacted by individual difference measures of trait reward and punishment sensitivity. Together, the results suggest both common and specific mechanisms by which approach and avoidance motivational states influence cognitive control, via activation of reward and punishment processing systems. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

The resemblance is plain to see between Kripke’s Wittgenstein introducing bizarre rules such as quaddition (in illustrating the sceptical paradox against theories of meaning) and Goodman’s introducing the equally bizarre grue (in generating the new riddle of induction). But the two sorts of bizarre cases also differ in interesting respects. For those familiar with Goodman’s case, this similarity sparks a strong temptation to enlist to the meaning sceptic’s cause key elements of Goodman’s new riddle, which are missing from Kripke’s case. (...) In this essay, I characterize a natural way of doing just this, which targets dispositionalist solutions to the sceptical paradox. I also show that, despite initial appearances, this new objection to dispositionalism (the symmetry problem) is not nearly as worrisome as originally thought. The solution offered on behalf of semantic dispositionalists does require a trade-off, though, from the severe form of indeterminacy advanced by the meaning sceptic to a much milder thesis. (shrink)

A semantic theory is committed to semantic monism just in case every particular semantic property posited by the theory is a member of the same kind. The commitment to semantic monism appears to draw some support from the need to provide a compositional semantics, since taking a single kind of semantic property as key to a semantic theory affords a uniform pattern on the basis of which the meaning of any given sentence can be compositionally determined. This line of support (...) highlights a tension between the principle of compositionality and taking a more pluralistic approach to semantic theorizing. In this essay, that tension is relieved, leaving open the prospect of a pluralistic semantic theory that observes the principle of compositionality. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Recent work by Peijnenburg, Atkinson, and Herzberg suggests that infinitists who accept a probabilistic construal of justification can overcome significant challenges to their position by attending to mathematical treatments of infinite probabilistic regresses. In this essay, it is argued that care must be taken when assessing the significance of these formal results. Though valuable lessons can be drawn from these mathematical exercises (many of which are not disputed here), the essay argues that it is entirely unclear that the form of (...) infinitism that results meets a basic requirement: namely, providing an account of infinite chains of propositions qua reasons made available to agents. (shrink)

Edited by Adam C. Pelser and W. Scott Cleveland * Includes interdisciplinary essays on underexplored issues in virtue formation * Provides fresh perspectives on neglected virtues including honesty, graciousness, intellectual humility, and accountability * Features profound insights from first-rate Christian philosophers in aid of moral and spiritual formation * Advances philosophical, psychological, and theological understanding of virtue formation by drawing on ancient philosophical/theological wisdom and contemporary science -/- The Christian tradition offers a robust and compelling vision of what it is (...) for human life to be lived well. Faith and Virtue Formation articulates various aspects of that vision in ways that will deepen understanding of the virtues and virtue formation. The collection considers the value of studying the vices for moral formation; the importance of emotion and agency in virtue formation; the connections between certain disabilities and virtue; the roles of divine grace, liturgy, worship, and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in Christian virtue formation; the formation of infused virtues, including the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love; the roles of friendship and the communal life of the Church in cultivating virtue; and new philosophical and theological reflections on some largely neglected virtues. Offering an interdisciplinary approach, the contributors draw on philosophical, theological, and biblical wisdom, along with insights from contemporary psychology and rich narrative examples, in aid of becoming good. By providing deeply insightful and edifying reflections on the prospects, processes, and practices of moral and spiritual formation, this volume demonstrates that moral philosophy not only illuminates, but it can also guide and inspire the formation of virtue. (shrink)

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations (...) between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture. (shrink)

If Savulescu's (2001, 2009) controversial principle of Procreative Beneficence (PB) is correct, then an important implication is that couples should employ genetic tests for non‐disease traits in selecting which child to bring into existence. Both defenders as well as some critics of this normative entailment of PB have typically accepted the comparatively less controversial claim about non‐disease traits: that there are non‐disease traits such that testing and selecting for them would in fact contribute to bringing about the child who is (...) expected to have the best life. We challenge this less controversial claim, not by arguing deductively for its falsity, but by showing that Savulescu's central argument for this presumably less controversial claim fails. Savulescu offers intelligence as the paradigm example of a testable non‐disease trait such that testing and selecting for it would increase the likelihood that the child selected would be the one who is expected to have the best life (or at least as good a life as the others). We provide a series of arguments aimed at demonstrating that Savulescu's argument from intelligence fails. If our arguments are successful, the upshot is not that PB is false, but more modestly, that the burden of proof remains squarely with Savulescu. (shrink)

Klein’s account of epistemic justification, infinitism, supplies a novel solution to the regress problem. We argue that concentrating on the normative aspect of justification exposes a number of unpalatable consequences for infinitism, all of which warrant rejecting the position. As an intermediary step, we develop a stronger version of the ‘finite minds’ objection.

Bastin et al. propose a dual-process model to understand memory deficits. However, results from state-trace analysis have suggested a single underlying variable in behavioral and neural data. We advocate the usage of unidimensional models that are supported by data and have been successful in understanding memory deficits and in linking to neural data.

Taming the power of Wall Street was a principal campaign theme for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 election. Roosevelt's election bore fruit in the Securities Act of 1933, which regulated the public offering of securities, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which regulated stock markets and the securities traded in those markets, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA), which legislated a wholesale reorganization of the utility industry. The reform effort was spearheaded by the newly created (...) Securities and Exchange Commission, part of the new wave of experts brought to Washington to rein in business. PUHCA also marked the federal government's first significant incursion into corporate governance, with a corresponding reduction in the traditional role of investment bankers. The SEC's ascendance over the investment bankers was reinforced during FDR's second term by the Chandler Act of 1938, which provided the agency with a broad role in the bankruptcy reorganization of troubled companies.Enacting those statutes was only the beginning, as the scope and effectiveness of the SEC's regulatory efforts depended critically on navigating these new statutes past an initially hostile Supreme Court. After substantial delay in the lower courts, the securities statutes eventually got a friendly hearing in the Supreme Court, where a number of Justices came to the Court after serving as the "Founding Fathers" of the federal securities laws. Roosevelt's Supreme Court nominees were involved in drafting the new legislation, securing its passage in Congress and implementing a litigation strategy that successfully stalled final determination of the constitutionality of the securities laws until New Deal appointed justices were in place. Felix Frankfurter played an important role in shaping the Securities Act and PUHCA, and was a key advisor on litigation strategy to the Roosevelt administration. Hugo Black led the legislative battle to enact PUHCA against the utility companies. Stanley Reed and Robert Jackson were key courtroom advocates arguing PUHCA's constitutionality. William O. Douglas headed the study of Protective Committees that led to the Chandler Act and was Chairman of the SEC. In this article, we explore the role of the New Deal justices in enacting the securities laws, litigating the challenges brought against them and then interpreting these laws in securities cases before the Supreme Court. We show the important role that these New Deal justices played in ensuring a broad scope for the federal securities laws through generous interpretation. Once constitutional questions had faded, securities cases proved to be a critical testing ground for newly emerging theories of administrative law. We demonstrate the split over the importance of judicial review versus deference to the rule of experts that emerged among these Roosevelt appointees. Finally, we explore the relative lack of influence of Douglas and Frankfurter in these cases, despite their familiarity and experience with the securities laws. (shrink)

Between 1934 and 1937 Maurice Blondel, the French Roman Catholic philosopher best known for his 1893 work, Action, published a trilogy of writings. Out of these writings came a theological ontology of tremendous force, creativity, and coherence. The purpose of the present dissertation is to reassess the viability of Blondel's ontology for contemporary theology. The retrieval begins with John Milbank's 1990 investigation of Blondel's early philosophy. While Milbank focuses on the strengths of Blondel, he also highlights some critical weaknesses. The (...) dissertation argues that Blondel later came to recognize and correct these weaknesses in his trilogy. ;La pensee, the first volume of the trilogy, discusses the nature and development of thought. Recognizing the ontological structure of thought leads Blondel to present his doctrine of the transnatural elan for assimilation to God. The transnatural desire for God is compared with Henri de Lubac's notion of naturae desiderium and then applied to the modern problem of the relationship between nature and supernature. ;The second installment of the trilogy, L'etre et les etres , explores the mysterious relation of Being and beings. Blondel situates the discussion within the language of creation, identifying Being as Creator and beings as creatures. The analogy of creation allows him to forge the proper relationship between Being and beings. After Blondel's death, two different schools of thought emerged on the mystery of being: Karl Rahner's Thomism and Jean-Luc Marion's new phenomenology. Each school is reviewed and critiqued from a Blondelian perspective. ;The trilogy concludes with a long-awaited revision of L'action . It begins by distinguishing the idea of action from action itself and establishing the ontological difference of action. Action is presented ontologically as enacted power, which is investigated in its individual, social, and metaphysical forms. Individual action is identified as making, practicing, and contemplating. Social action is studied next, with the conclusion that the social being of enacted power is determined by either a philosophy of peace or violence. Finally, divine action is evaluated with regards to the language of causality and absolute power. Blondel proposes instead to describe God's activity in terms of pure action. (shrink)

From philosophy to theology -- Structure -- Mystery -- Power.

Moral hypocrisy is motivation to appear moral yet, if possible, avoid the cost of actually being moral. In business, moral hypocrisy allows one to engender trust, solve the commitment problem, and still relentlessly pursue personal gain. Indicating the power of this motive, research has provided clear and consistent evidence that, given the opportunity, many people act to appear fair (e.g., they flip a coin to distribute resources between themselves and another person) without actually being fair (they accept the flip only (...) if it favors themselves). New evidence also indicates the power of moral hypocrisy in a situation more obviously relevant to business, resource allocation when one party has information about relative resource value that the other does not. Characteristics of modern business situations likely to encourage moral hypocrisy are outlined. We conclude that moral hypocrisy is not only a pragmatic virtue in modern business but is also fast becoming a prescriptive one. (shrink)

According to certain kinds of semantic dispositionalism, what an agent means by her words is grounded by her dispositions to complete simple tasks. This sort of position is often thought to avoid the finitude problem raised by Kripke against simpler forms of dispositionalism. The traditional objection is that, since words possess indefinite (or infinite) extensions, and our dispositions to use words are only finite, those dispositions prove inadequate to serve as ground for what we mean by our words. I argue (...) that, even if such positions (emphasizing simple tasks) avoid the traditional form of Kripke's charge, they still succumb to special cases of the finitude problem. Furthermore, I show how such positions can be augmented so as to avoid even these special cases. Doing so requires qualifying the dispositions of interest as those possessed by the abstracted version of an actual agent (in contrast to, say, an idealized version of the agent). In addition to avoiding the finitude problem in its various forms, the position that results provides new materials for appreciating the role that abstracting models can play for a dispositionalist theory of meaning. (shrink)

Although it does not appear on many traditional lists of the virtues, respect for human dignity is an important virtue in its own right that is characterized as much by emotions as by other mental states and actions. The virtue of respect for human dignity essentially involves the dispositions to feel the emotion of respect for the dignity of others and an emotional sense of one’s own dignity. As exemplified by Nelson Mandela, this virtue also involves a keen perceptual sensitivity (...) to humiliating and degrading treatment, along with dispositions to protest, correct, and prevent such treatment. The person with the virtue of respect for human dignity also will be disposed to feel indignation toward willful violations of human dignity, compassion for those whose dignity is violated, and various positive emotions in response to victories for human dignity. Although this virtue closely resembles other, more widely recognized, virtues, such as justice and love, it nevertheless is appropriate to treat respect for human dignity as a distinct virtue, as well as an emotion. (shrink)