Background: Research activities in sub-Saharan Africa may be limited to delegated tasks due to the strong control from Western collaborators, which could lead to scientific production of little value in terms of its impact on social and economic innovation in less developed areas. However, the current contexts of international biomedical research including the development of public-private partnerships and research institutions in Africa suggest that scientific activities are growing in sub-Saharan Africa. This study aims to describe the patterns of clinical research (...) activities at a sub-Saharan biomedical research center. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with a core group of researchers at the Medical Research Unit of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital from June 2009 to February 2010 in Lambarene, Gabon. Scientific activities running at the MRU as well as the implementation of ethical and regulatory standards were covered by the interview sessions. Results: The framework of clinical research includes transnational studies and research initiated locally. In transnational collaborations, a sub-Saharan research institution may be limited to producing confirmatory and late-stage data with little impact on economic and social innovation. However, ethical and regulatory guidelines are being implemented taking into consideration the local contexts. Similarly, the scientific content of studies designed by researchers at the MRU, if local needs are taken into account, may potentially contribute to a scientific production with long-term value on social and economic innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. Conclusion: Further research questions and methods in social sciences should comprehensively address the construction of scientific content with the social, economic and cultural contexts surrounding research activities. (shrink)

Cet article propose de considérer la complexité du vécu psychique de mères d’enfants placés. À partir d’un cas unique, les auteurs cherchent à évaluer le rôle de la qualité des processus associatifs dans le vécu du placement, et ce dans une approche métapsychologique. La méthodologie mise en place s’inscrit ainsi dans une démarche qualitative étayée par des entretiens cliniques et par la passation d’une épreuve projective ( tat ). À travers la situation clinique d’Alice, cette étude tente de repérer les (...) facteurs favorisant l’élaboration de la séparation et la mise au travail psychique du placement et de son histoire de vie. Elle conclut sur les conditions d’un potentiel transformateur du placement et ses effets de réorganisation psychique. (shrink)

Lawyers in many jurisdictions are ageing, and yet there is little information concerning the age profile of the legal profession. This paper presents the first consideration of the age profile of lawyers outside of the US, showing that Australian lawyers are ageing and delaying retirement. These findings have serious implications. Problems associated with a growing proportion of older lawyers include an increasing risk of lawyers suffering from age-related cognitive and physical impairment, and the related rise of complaints and malpractice claims (...) against older lawyers. It is also clear that the Australian legal profession is unprepared to address these problems. The legal profession has ignored important gender-specific implications of ageing, such as female lawyers experiencing menopause and the lower savings of female lawyers moving into retirement. Regulatory regimes have not considered the impact of the profession's ageing profile, and there is no mandatory reporting of lawyers suffering from age-related impairment or provisions should a lawyer die. The profession also has not provided strategies to positively transition lawyers into retirement, and there is a lack of flexible working arrangements and succession planning, especially in firms located outside urban centres. (shrink)

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply ‘wisdom’), which is the understanding required to make reliably good decisions about how we ought to live, is something we all have reason to care about. The importance of wisdom gives rise to questions about its nature: what kind of state is wisdom, how can we develop it, and what is a wise person like? These questions about the nature of wisdom give rise to further questions about proper methods for studying wisdom. Is the study of (...) wisdom the proper subject of philosophy or psychology? How, exactly, can we determine what wisdom is and how we can get it? In this chapter, we give an overview of some prominent philosophical answers to these questions. We begin by distinguishing practical wisdom from theoretical wisdom and wisdom as epistemic humility. Once we have a clearer sense of the target, we address questions of method and argue that producing a plausible and complete account of wisdom will require the tools of both philosophy and empirical psychology. We also discuss the implications this has for prominent wisdom research methods in empirical psychology. We then survey prominent philosophical accounts of the nature of wisdom and end with reflections on the prospects for further interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower.[1] More and more attention is being paid to the epistemic injustices that exist in our scientific practices. In a recent paper, Fabien Medvecky argues that science communication is fundamentally epistemically unjust. In what follows we briefly explain his argument before raising several challenges to it.

What counts as health or ill health? How do we deal with the fallibility of our own bodies? Should illness and disease be considered simply in biological terms, or should considerations of its emotional impact dictate our treatment of it? Our understanding of health and illness had become increasingly more complex in the modern world, as we are able to use medicine not only to fight disease but to control other aspects of our bodies, whether mood, blood pressure, or cholesterol. (...) This collection of essays foregrounds the concepts of health and illness and patient experience within the philosophy of medicine, reflecting on the relationship between the ill person and society. Mental illness is considered alongside physical disease, and the important ramifications of society's differentiation between the two are brought to light. Health, Illness and Disease is a significant contribution to shaping the parameters of the evolving field of philosophy of medicine and will be of interest to medical practitioners and policy-makers as well as philosophers of science and ethicists. (shrink)

This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary biomedicine as a cultural practice.

This paper analyses the use of metaphor in discourses around the “superweed” Palmer amaranth. Most weed scientists associated with the US public agricultural extension system dismiss the term superweed. However, together with the media, they indirectly encourage aggressive control practices by actively diffusing the framing of herbicide resistant Palmer amaranth as an existential threat that should be eradicated at any cost. We use argumentative discourse analysis to better understand this process. We analyze a corpus consisting of reports, policy briefs, and (...) press releases produced by state extension services, as well as articles from professional and popular magazines and newspapers quoting extension specialists and/or public sector weed scientists or agronomists. We show how the superweed discourse is powered by negative metaphors, and legitimizes aggressive steps to eradicate the weed. This discourse reinforces the farmers’ techno-optimism master frame, contributes to deskilling of farmers and sidelines ethical concerns. (shrink)

BackgroundStigma refers to a distinguishing personal trait that is perceived as or actually is physically, socially, or psychologically disadvantageous. Little is known about the opinion of those who have more or less stigmatizing health conditions regarding the need for consent for use of their personal information for health research.MethodsWe surveyed the opinions of people 18 years and older with seven health conditions. Participants were drawn from: physicians' offices and clinics in southern Ontario; and from a cross-Canada marketing panel of individuals (...) with the target health conditions. For each of five research scenarios presented, respondents chose one of five consent choices: (1) no need for me to know; (2) notice with opt-out; (3) broad opt-in; (4) project-specific permission; and (5) this information should not be used. Consent choices were regressed onto: demographics; health condition; and attitude measures of privacy, disclosure concern, and the benefits of health research. We conducted focus groups to discuss possible reasons for observed consent choices.ResultsWe observed substantial variation in the control that people wish to have over use of their personal information for research. However, consent choice profiles were similar across health conditions, possibly due to sampling bias. Research involving profit or requiring linkage of health information with income, education, or occupation were associated with more restrictive consent choices. People were more willing to link their health information with biological samples than with information about their income, occupation, or education.ConclusionsThe heterogeneity in consent choices suggests individuals should be offered some choice in use of their information for different types of health research, even if limited to selectively opting-out. Some of the implementation challenges could be designed into the interoperable electronic health record. However, many questions remain, including how best to capture the opinions of those who are more privacy sensitive. (shrink)

Organizations that believe they should "give something back" to the society have embraced the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Although the theoretical underpinnings of CSR have been frequently debated, empirical studies often involve only limited aspects, implying that theory may not be congruent with actual practices and may impede understanding and further development of CSR. The authors investigate actual CSR practices related to five different stakeholder groups, develop an instrument to measure those CSR practices, and apply it to a (...) survey of 401 U.S. organizations. Four different clusters of organizations emerge, depending on the CSR practice focus. The distinctive features of each cluster relate to organizational demographics, perceived influence of stakeholders, managers' perceptions of the influence of CSR on performance, and organizational performance. (shrink)

Forty years of experimentation on class inclusion and its probabilistic relatives have led to inconsistent results and conclusions about human reasoning. Recent research on the conjunction "fallacy" recapitulates this history. In contrast to previous results, we found that a majority of participants adhere to class inclusion in the classic Linda problem. We outline a theoretical framework that attributes the contradictory results to differences in statistical sophistication and to differences in response mode-whether participants are asked for probability estimates or ranks-and propose (...) two precise cognitive algorithms for ranking probabilities. Our framework allows us to make novel predictions about when and why people adhere to class inclusion. Evidence obtained in several studies supports these predictions and demonstrates that the proposed ranking algorithms can account for about three-quarters of participants' inferences in the Linda problem. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychologists claim that the mind contains “hundreds or thousands” of “genetically specified” modules, which are evolutionary adaptations for their cognitive functions. We argue that, while the adult human mind/brain typically contains a degree of modularization, its “modules” are neither genetically specified nor evolutionary adaptations. Rather, they result from the brain’s developmental plasticity, which allows environmental task demands a large role in shaping the brain’s information-processing structures. The brain’s developmental plasticity is our fundamental psychological adaptation, and the “modules” that result (...) from it are adaptive responses to local conditions, not past evolutionary environments. If different individuals share common environ- ments, however, they may develop similar “modules,” and this process can mimic the development of genetically specified modules in the evolutionary psychologist’s sense. (shrink)

In the context of change to the “new modernity” described in Beck’s work, companies develop management modes and methods that focus more and more on individuals. Constitutive of the individualization process, human resources practices have become ambivalent as the process itself. This contribution examines how a managerial and organizational innovation as telework contributes to the process of individualization, and the paradoxes it addresses to management. At the interface of the social and the technical, teleworking appears as a flexible arrangement, meeting (...) employees’ and employer’s demands – which is a characteristic of the process of individualization – by simultaneously fragmenting collectivity, exposing individuals to social risk, and producing exclusion. The authors focus on two consecutive paradoxes of such individualized managerial practices: the individual–collective dilemma and the autonomy–control paradox. Finally, the paper reveals HRM as a new institution of individualization in a world where regulation functions are more and more transferred to individuals themselves. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This paper examines the norms that should guide policies aimed at promoting happiness or, more broadly, well-being. In particular, we take up the question of which conception of well-being should govern well-being policy, assuming some such policies to be legitimate. In answer, we lay out a case for ‘pragmatic subjectivism’: given widely accepted principles of respect for persons, well-being policy may not assume any view of well-being, subjectivist or objectivist. Rather, it should promote what its intended beneficiaries see as good (...) for them: pleasure for hedonists, excellence for Aristotelians, etc. Specifically, well-being policy should promote citizens’ ‘personal welfare values’: those values—and not mere preferences—that individuals see as bearing on their well-being. Finally, we briefly consider how pragmatic subjectivism works in practice. While our discussion takes for granted the legitimacy of well-being policy, we suggest that pragmatic subjectivism strengthens the case for such policy. (shrink)

The hippocampal formation is known for its importance in conscious, declarative memory. Here, we report neuroimaging evidence in humans for an additional role of the hippocampal formation in nonconscious memory. We maskedly presented combinations of faces and written professions such that subjects were not aware of them. Nevertheless, the masked presentations activated many of the brain regions that unmasked presentations of these stimuli did. To induce a nonconscious retrieval of the faces and face-associated occupational information, subjects were instructed to view (...) the previously masked faces and to guess the professional category of each person—academic, artist, and workman. Guessing the professional category of previously masked versus new faces activated the left and right hippocampal formation and right perirhinal cortex as well as bilateral fusiform areas and fronto-temporal areas known to mediate the retrieval of semantic information. These activations within the semantic processing system suggest that conceptual knowledge acquired during masking was nonconsciously retrieved. Our data provide clues to an analogous role of the hippocampus in conscious and nonconscious memory. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 12, December 2019, Page 66-68.

Historically developed along gender lines and arguably the most sex segregated of institutions, U.S. prisons are organized around the assumption of a gender binary. In this context, the existence and increasing visibility of transgender prisoners raise questions about how gender is accomplished by transgender prisoners in prisons for men. This analysis draws on official data and original interview data from 315 transgender inmates in 27 California prisons for men to focus analytic attention on the pursuit of “the real deal”—a concept (...) we develop to reference a dynamic related to how gender is accomplished by transgender inmates. Specifically, among transgender inmates in prisons for men, there is competition for the attention and affection of “real men” in prisons: the demonstrable and well-articulated desire to secure standing as “the best girl” in sex segregated institutional environments. Our empirical examination sheds light on the gender order that underpins prison life, the lived experience of gender and sexuality for transgender inmates in prisons for men, and how that experience reveals new aspects of the workings of gender accountability. (shrink)

Le suivi psychologique d’une femme dans la cinquantaine est l’occasion de saisir les effets du corps malade et vieillissant sur la vie psychique. Suite à une atteinte somatique bénigne mais surchargée d’enjeux du féminin et du maternel, Toni apprend une infidélité de son mari et elle s’effondre. Les auteures interrogent comment le psychologue d’orientation psychanalytique peut entendre la souffrance contemporaine du corps et l’actualité du désamour et leurs déterminations inconscientes. Les faits somatiques et de la scène conjugale sont une porte (...) d’entrée pour revisiter des événements passés, leur charge affective et pour dénouer un contrat narcissique conjugal autour de la performance et de la réussite. (shrink)

Lawyers in many jurisdictions are ageing, and yet there is little information concerning the age profile of the legal profession. This paper presents the first consideration of the age profile of lawyers outside of the US, showing that Australian lawyers are ageing and delaying retirement. These findings have serious implications. Problems associated with a growing proportion of older lawyers include an increasing risk of lawyers suffering from age-related cognitive and physical impairment, and the related rise of complaints and malpractice claims (...) against older lawyers. It is also clear that the Australian legal profession is unprepared to address these problems. The legal profession has ignored important gender-specific implications of ageing, such as female lawyers experiencing menopause and the lower savings of female lawyers moving into retirement. Regulatory regimes have not considered the impact of the profession's ageing profile, and there is no mandatory reporting of lawyers suffering from age-related impairment or provisions should a lawyer die. The profession also has not provided strategies to positively transition lawyers into retirement, and there is a lack of flexible working arrangements and succession planning, especially in firms located outside urban centres. (shrink)

Do all clinical research publications show strong application of ethics principles and respect for biomedical law? We examined, for the year 2009, the ethics requirements displayed on the website of 30 leading medical journals with an impact factor (IF) >10, and 30 others with an IF <10. We carried out a short study looking at the relationship between the IF of a journal and the ethics requirements in its instructions to authors. We show that the IF of a biomedical journal (...) bears a direct relationship to its ethics requirements. Such results should improve the ethics requirements of all biomedical journals, especially those with low IF, so that they are internationally standardised to the higher standard required by journals with higher IF. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractEnormous efforts and resources are being invested in the search for biomarkers for early cancer detection. However, the biology and genetics of cancer, an extremely heterogeneous disease from the molecular viewpoint, thwart the clinical application of laboratory discoveries, and the sought-for pan-cancer biomarkers for population screening remain out of reach. Notwithstanding advances made using artificial intelligence to overcome current limitations in cancer biomarker research, in article number 1900122, Tommaso A. Dragani et al. speculate that there is still a long (...) way to go before this important public health goal is achieved. (shrink)

Thousands of candidate cancer biomarkers have been proposed, but so far, few are used in cancer screening. Failure to implement these biomarkers is attributed to technical and design flaws in the discovery and validation phases, but a major obstacle stems from cancer biology itself. Oncogenomics has revealed broad genetic heterogeneity among tumors of the same histology and same tissue (or organ) from different patients, while tumors of different tissue origins also share common genetic mutations. Moreover, there is wide intratumor genetic (...) heterogeneity among cells within any single neoplasm. These findings seriously limit the prospects of finding a single biomarker with high specificity for early cancer detection. Current research focuses on developing biomarker panels, with data assessment by machine‐learning algorithms. Whether such approaches will overcome the inherent limitations posed by tumor biology and lead to tests with true clinical value remains to be seen. (shrink)

Recently claims have been made for radical new insights in the field of invertebrate immunology that involve memory, specificity and/or maternal transfer of immunocompetence. For evidence these claims rely on phenomena, such as survival or reproductive capacity, observed at the level of the whole organism. The allure of these apparently revelatory hypotheses is that they are contrary to established views of innate immunity. They draw implicit analogy to adaptive responses in jawed vertebrates and the terminology used creates an incomplete and (...) misleading picture. We argue that the case for adaptive immunity in invertebrates based only on such phenomena is weak and flawed, as it can only be upheld if supported by descriptions of the underlying mechanisms. We caution against a reliance on this approach as a means of advancing this field—highlighting, as an example, some negative commercial implications of adopting this approach. BioEssays 29:1138–1146, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In the past 20, years the impact of progressive educational theories have become influential in nurse education particularly in relation to partnership and empowerment between lecturers and students and the development of student autonomy. The introduction of these progressive theories was in response to the criticisms that nurse education was characterized by hierarchical and asymmetrical power relationships between lecturers and students that encouraged rote learning and stifled student autonomy. This article explores how the work of Michel Foucault can be mobilized (...) to think about autonomy in three different yet overlapping ways: as a historical event; as a discursive practice; and as part of an overall strategy to produce a specific student subject position. The implications for educational practice are that, rather than a site where students are empowered, nurse education is both a factory and a laboratory where new subjectivities are continually being constructed. This suggests that empowering practices and disciplinary practices uneasily co‐exist. Critical reflection needs to be directed not only at structural dimensions of power but also on ourselves as students and lecturers by asking a Foucauldian question: How are you interested in autonomy? (shrink)

This paper discloses and questions two assumptions on happiness that are implied by medical and technological proposals for mood enhancement. The first assumption holds that happiness consists of the indiscriminate maximization of positive and minimization of negative emotions. Second, mood enhancement implies the belief that an effortless enhancement of positive emotions will increase happiness. These assumptions are questioned by investigating the validity of the common sense slogan ‘No pain, no gain’. Support for this claim is found in literature on adversity (...) and happiness, effort and happiness, and in evolutionary psychology. From these research domains it is shown that adversity, pain, bother or effort should not always be regarded as negative experiences to be avoided in the pursuit for happiness. In some cases they can contribute to a person’s quality of life. By questioning the indiscriminate and effortless enhancement of positive emotions and avoidance of negative ones, this perspective suggests a different view on happiness than the one generally assumed by proponents of mood enhancement. (shrink)

This study examined the effect of an interference task on the consolidation of duration in long-term memory. In a temporal generalization task, the participants performed a learning phase with a reference duration that either was, or was not, followed 30 minutes later by a 15-min interference task. They were then given a memory test, 24h later. Using different participant groups, several reference durations were examined, from several hundred milliseconds (600ms) to several seconds (2.5, 4 and 8s). The results showed that (...) the scalar timing property (i.e. precision proportional to judged duration) was preserved despite the interference task given during the memory consolidation process. However, the interference task increased the variability of time judgment and tended to produce a lengthening effect in all reference duration conditions. The modeling of individual data with parameters derived from scalar expectancy theory suggests that disrupting the memory consolidation of learned reference durations introduces noise in their representation in memory, with time being specifically distorted towards a lengthened duration. (shrink)