Weltanschauung as a priori: sociology of knowledge from a ‘romantic’ stance

In this paper I reconstruct the central concept of the young Lukács??s and Mannheim??s sociology of knowledge, as they present it in their writings in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that this concept, namely Weltanschauung, is used to refer to some conceptually unstructured totality of feelings, which they take to be a condition of possibility of intellectual production, and this understanding is contrasted to an alternative construal of the term that presents it as logically structured, quasi-theoretical background knowledge. This concept has Kantian reminiscences: it is a condition of possibility of intellectual production in general. The young Mannheim and Lukács rely on ??Weltanschauung?? so understood as a phenomenon mediating between the facts of society and individual intellectual production and reception: it is seen as being conditioned by sociological facts and therefore as a historical and sociological category through which, and therefore indirectly, society enters into intellectual production.     

Parents of Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) and Compound Caregiving Responsibilities

In some cases, parents caring for an adult child with an intellectual and/or developmental disability (IDD) must balance this with caregiving for another family member. This dual responsibility, referred to as “compound caregiving”, may contribute to increased feelings of distress, or change their perceived ability to care for their child. The current study examined how compound caregivers differ from other parents of adults with IDD, and whether compound caregiving is significantly associated with family distress. Data was available for 199 parents aged 38 to 91 years who were seeking adult services for their son or daughter with IDD. Parents completed a mailed questionnaire and telephone interview in which they indicated compound caregiver responsibilities. Parents identified as compound caregivers were then compared to those who were not in terms of family characteristics, as well as parental perceptions of burden and mastery, and family distress as measured by the Revised Caregiver Appraisal Scale and the Brief Family Distress Scale, respectively. Nearly half of the parents reported being compound caregivers. The demographic profile of these parents was no different from that of the other parents but their children were slightly younger. Compound caregiving was significantly associated with parental perceptions of burden and mastery and family distress. Demands outside of caring for an adult child with IDD can negatively influence family functioning and must be included as part of caregiving assessments.     

Plasma corticosterone and immune reactivity in restrained female C3H mice

Psychological stressors are known to stimulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the sympathetic nervous system resulting in the release of corticosterone and catecholamines respectively. They have also been reported to induce cytokine production. All these molecules affect various immune parameters and can alter overall immune competence of the individual. The purpose of this investigation was to study the regulation of the production of corticosterone during stress and its possible effects on immune reactivity. In a first series of experiments, the possible regulation of corticosterone production by interleukin (IL)-1beta and peripheral catecholamines during restraint was assessed using a pharmacological approach in mice. Plasma IL-1beta concentrations remained at basal after 1-h restraint and the stress-induced increase of plasma corticosterone was not modified by a peripheral injection of an IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1ra). By contrast, chemical sympathectomy potentiated the restraint-induced increase in plasma corticosterone concentration, this potentiation being reversed by IL-1ra. In a second series of experiments, the role of corticosterone in stress-immune relationships was studied in adrenalectomized mice subjected to restraint and immunized with sheep erythrocytes. Non-specific immunity, i.e. proliferation of splenocytes and thymocytes and plasma levels of IL-1beta, as well as specific immunity, i.e. antibody production and delayed hypersensitivity, were not altered after 2-h restraint. Adrenalectomy failed to induce immune effects in stressed animals, except that delayed hypersensitivity was stronger in adrenalectomized animals, revealing that the high levels of corticosterone produced during stress have an anti-inflammatory activity. The present data show that the stress-induced production of corticosterone was modulated by both peripheral catecholamines and IL-1beta. However, this production of corticosterone was unable to modulate immune reactivity except delayed hypersensitivity.     

Intentional and Phenomenal Properties: How not to be Inseparatists

Philosophia - In this paper I give an overview of the recent developments in the phenomenalism – intentionalism debate and try to show that the proposed solutions of neither sides are...     

Procedural Fairness,the Economy,and Support for Political Authorities

A vast literature in social and organizational psychology suggests that support for authorities is driven both by the outcomes they deliver to people and by the extent to which they employ fair decision making processes. Furthermore, some of that literature describes a process‐outcome interaction, through which the effect of outcome favorability is reduced as process fairness increases. However, very few studies have been conducted to determine whether such interaction is also present in the explanation of support for political authorities. Here, we start by analyzing whether individual perceptions of the political system’s procedural fairness moderate the well‐known individual‐level relationship between perceived economic performance and government approval. Then, we explore the implications of such process‐outcome interaction to the phenomenon of “economic voting,” testing whether impartiality in governance moderates the effect of objective economic performance on aggregate incumbent parties’ support. In both cases, we show that the interaction between processes and outcomes seems to extend beyond the organizational contexts where it has been previously observed, with important implications for the study of political support.     

Aging and performance on an everyday-based visual search task

Research on aging and visual search often requires older people to search computer screens for target letters or numbers. The aim of this experiment was to investigate age-related differences using an everyday-based visual search task in a large participant sample (n=261) aged 20-88 years. Our results show that: (1) old-old adults have more difficulty with triple conjunction searches with one highly distinctive feature compared to young-old and younger adults; (2) age-related declines in conjunction searches emerge in middle age then progress throughout older age; (3) age-related declines are evident in feature searches on target absent trials, as older people seem to exhaustively and serially search the whole display to determine a target's absence. Together, these findings suggest that declines emerge in middle age then progress throughout older age in feature integration, guided search, perceptual grouping and/or spreading suppression processes. Discussed are implications for enhancing everyday functioning throughout adulthood.     

An ecological analysis of the effects of deviant peer clustering on sexual promiscuity, problem behavior, and childbearing from early adolescence to adulthood: an enhancement of the life history framework

The authors propose that peer relationships should be included in a life history perspective on adolescent problem behavior. Longitudinal analyses were used to examine deviant peer clustering as the mediating link between attenuated family ties, peer marginalization, and social disadvantage in early adolescence and sexual promiscuity in middle adolescence and childbearing by early adulthood. Specifically, 998 youths, along with their families, were assessed at age 11 years and periodically through age 24 years. Structural equation modeling revealed that the peer-enhanced life history model provided a good fit to the longitudinal data, with deviant peer clustering strongly predicting adolescent sexual promiscuity and other correlated problem behaviors. Sexual promiscuity, as expected, also strongly predicted the number of children by ages 22-24 years. Consistent with a life history perspective, family social disadvantage directly predicted deviant peer clustering and number of children in early adulthood, controlling for all other variables in the model. These data suggest that deviant peer clustering is a core dimension of a fast life history strategy, with strong links to sexual activity and childbearing. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to the need to integrate an evolutionary-based model of self-organized peer groups in developmental and intervention science.     

Motor coordination dynamics underlying graphic motion in 7- to 11-year-old children

Using concepts and tools of a dynamical system approach in order to understand motor coordination underlying graphomotor skills, the aim of the current study was to establish whether the basic coordination dynamics found in adults is already established in children at elementary school, when handwriting is trained and eventually acquired. In the study, 45 children and 9 adults volunteered to copy two series of 13 ellipsoid shapes. These shapes were generated by manipulating the relative phase between 0° and 180° of two orthogonal oscillators in two orientations. Findings showed that although children from an early age onward and adults reproduced straight lines precisely (i.e., 0° and 180°), the former drew ellipsoid shapes in a less eccentric fashion than the latter (i.e., ～90° in all children rather than ～60° and 120° in adults). This tendency to write in a rounder fashion persists until 11 years of age, suggesting that the coordination dynamics underlying graphomotor skills and tentatively shaping the coordinated activity involved in adult handwriting appears only later, probably due to increasing constraints on speed.     

Passion for a cause, passion for a creed: on ideological passion, identity threat, and extremism

Passion energizes and directs both peaceful and violent ideologically inspired movements. The type of ideological passion that underlies people's political or religious commitment was proposed to moderate the effect of social identity–threatening circumstances on their choice of activist tactics. Ideological passion was defined as a strong inclination toward a loved, valued, and self‐defining cause, ideology, or group in which people invest considerable time and energy. Harmonious ideological passion was expected to promote peaceful activism and nonviolence partly because it is anchored in a strong and secure sense of identity—one that facilitates nondefensiveness in identity‐threatening circumstances. Obsessive ideological passion, in contrast, was expected to engender hatred and aggressive extremism in identity‐threatening circumstances partly because it is anchored in a strong, but insecure, sense of identity. Results from 2 studies, conducted with nationalist activists (N = 114) and devout Muslims (N = 111), supported these hypotheses. Implications for the motivation/passion and intergroup literatures are discussed.