Gödel’s Natural Deduction

This is a companion to a paper by the authors entitled “Gödel on deduction”, which examined the links between some philosophical views ascribed to Gödel and general proof theory. When writing that other paper, the authors were not acquainted with a system of natural deduction that Gödel presented with the help of Gentzen’s sequents, which amounts to Ja?kowski’s natural deduction system of 1934, and which may be found in Gödel’s unpublished notes for the elementary logic course he gave in 1939 at the University of Notre Dame. Here one finds a presentation of this system of Gödel accompanied by a brief reexamination in the light of the notes of some points concerning his interest in sequents made in the preceding paper. This is preceded by a brief summary of Gödel’s Notre Dame course, and is followed by comments concerning Gödel’s natural deduction system.     

Uncovering a New Moral Dilemma of Economic Optimization in Biotechnological Processing

The trend of emerging biorefineries is to process the harvest as efficiently as possible and without any waste. From the most valuable phytomass, refined medicines, enzymes, dyes and other special reactants are created. Functional foods, food ingredients, oils, alcohol, solvents, plastics, fillers and a wide variety of other chemical products follow. After being treated with nutrient recovery techniques (for fertilizer production), biofuels or soil improvers are produced from the leftovers. Economic optimization algorithms have confirmed that such complex biorefineries can be financially viable only when a high degree of feedstock concentration is included. Because the plant material is extremely voluminous before processing, the farming intensity of special plants increases in the nearest vicinity of agglomerations where the biorefineries are built for logistical reasons. Interdisciplinary analyses revealed that these optimization measures lead to significantly increased pollen levels in neighbouring urban areas and subsequently an increased risk of allergies, respectively costs to the national health system. A new moral dilemma between the shareholder’s profit and public interest was uncovered and subjected to disputation.     

Computerized cognitive training during physical inactivity improves executive functioning in older adults

The hippocampus is closely tied to spatial navigation, a central component in cognitive functioning, and critically involved in age-associated cognitive decline and dementia. This study evaluated a novel, cognitive computerized spatial navigation training (CSNT) program targeting the hippocampus, with expectation of mitigating possible cognitive decline with bed rest (BR). During a 14-day BR study with 16 healthy, older men (mean age = 60 ± 3, range = 55–65 years), half received CSNT for 12 days in 50-min sessions and half were controls (watching documentaries). This design uniquely controlled diet, sleep, and other personal and environmental activities. Although there were no cognitive declines in controls post-BR, CSNT participants demonstrated significant increases in executive/attention ability and processing speed, and continued spatial navigation testing showed improvement to 400 days post-BR. This intervention may prove useful to mitigate cognitive declines known to occur in long periods of immobilization and could have broader implications in protecting against age-related cognitive decline.     

Emotional reactions to scandals: When does moral character make a difference?

A scandal can evoke public outrage when it is widely publicized and involves an individual who is perceived to have a high level of cultural representativeness. Two experiments showed that when the scandalous target's moral character was highlighted, emotional responses towards the target were least negative when the scandal was widely circulated and when the target was seen as a representative of his culture. These results suggest that when a cultural symbol is implicated in a widely‐circulated scandal, the negative emotions directed towards the scandalous individual can be alleviated when the public remains confident in his or her commitment to morality.     

Homophonic context effects when naming Japanese kanji: evidence for processing costs?

The current study investigated the effects of phonologically related context pictures on the naming latencies of target words in Japanese and Chinese. Reading bare words in alphabetic languages has been shown to be rather immune to effects of context stimuli, even when these stimuli are presented in advance of the target word (e.g., Glaser & Düngelhoff, 1984 ; Roelofs, 2003 ). However, recently, semantic context effects of distractor pictures on the naming latencies of Japanese kanji (but not Chinese hànzì) words have been observed (Verdonschot, La Heij, & Schiller, 2010 ). In the present study, we further investigated this issue using phonologically related (i.e., homophonic) context pictures when naming target words in either Chinese or Japanese. We found that pronouncing bare nouns in Japanese is sensitive to phonologically related context pictures, whereas this is not the case in Chinese. The difference between these two languages is attributed to processing costs caused by multiple pronunciations for Japanese kanji.     

The future of involuntary civil commitment in the U.S.A. after Kansas v. Hendricks

This article examines new sexual predator commitment laws enacted recently in the United States to civilly commit dangerous sex offenders after they have served their prison sentences. It then examines Kansas v. Hendricks, a Supreme Court case that upheld these laws as constitutionally permitted. The article next describes the broad parameters that demarcate the government's civil commitment authority identified by the Supreme Court in that case. The author concludes that Hendricks establishes that the state has expansive civil commitment power much greater than our previous understanding. The government may use civil commitment solely to protect the public from dangerous individuals without proving a medically recognized mental disorder, recent evidence of dangerousness, or a treatment purpose or possibility. Moreover, this quarantine system may be justified by proving the same unlawful behavior for which the individual has already been criminally punished.     

Stroop dilution but not word-processing dilution: evidence for attention capture

Stroop dilution refers to the observation that the impact of a color word on the naming of a color bar is reduced if another word-like object is displayed simultaneously. Recently, Brown, Roos-Gilbert, and Carr (1995) concluded that Stroop dilution is due to early-visual interference. This conclusion was evaluated in three experiments. Experiment 1 showed that, contrary to the predictions of an early-visual interference account, (a) diluters that are similar in terms of visual complexity induced different amounts of dilution and (b) the size of the dilution effect is proportional to the size of the Stroop interference effect when the diluters are used as single distractors. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that when the position of the color bar is pre-cued, Stroop dilution disappears. We argue that these findings support Van der Heijden's (1992) attention-capture account of Stroop dilution.     

Social Anxiety in Children with Anxiety Disorders: Relation with Social and Emotional Functioning

Investigated the psychometric properties of the Social Anxiety Scale for children-Revised (SASC-R) as well as relations between social anxiety and children's social and emotional functioning. Participants were a clinic sample of children, ages 6–11 with anxiety disorders (N = 154) who completed the SASC-R. For a subset of these children, parent ratings of social skills, and self-ratings of perceived competence and peer interactions were also obtained. Factor analysis of the SASC-R supported the original three-factor solution and internal consistencies were in the acceptable range. Among children with simple phobia, scores on the SASC-R differentiated those with and without a comorbid social-based anxiety disorder. Social anxiety was also associated with impairments in social and emotional functioning. Specifically, highly socially anxious children reported low levels of social acceptance and global self-esteem and more negative peer interactions. Girls with high levels of social anxiety were also rated by parents as having poor social skills, particularly in the areas of assertive and responsible social behavior.     

Traumatization of group leaders in their work with displaced persons

Displaced persons are a special, threatened group of people, participants in this war, who were suddenly forced to abandon their homes. The majority of them were, overnight, left without anything they had, some even without their closest family. They all have one thing in common: they have all lost so much. Work with such people is directed toward overcoming their feelings of loss and abandonment and preventing psychical decompensation. Groups of displaced persons temporarily sheltered in the Rijeka region have been observed to be markedly regressed, with increased sensitivity, a low degree of tolerance, great demands on society and strongly expressed projective tendencies. Therapists suffer personal traumatization in working with displaced persons. This paper describes the reactions and feelings of group leaders caused by manifestations of group dynamics in different phases of exile.