Zen Buddhism and the intrinsic value of nature

Part IIt is a perennial theme in the literature on environmental ethics that the exploitation of the environment is the result of a blindness to (or perhaps a refusal to recognize) the intrinsic value of natural beings. The general story here is that Western traditions of thought have tended to accord natural beings value only to the extent that they prove useful to humans, that they have tended to see nature as only instrumentally valuable. By contrast, it is said that a new, environmentally friendly understanding of the world would value nature ‘for its own sake’, would conceive natural beings as having intrinsic value. In the light of such an understanding, the oak tree, for instance, would be seen not merely as a source of timber or shade or as a decoration for the front lawn, but as valuable ‘in itself’, as having an intrinsic value that ought to be respected (see further, O'Neill 1993, chapter 2).     

The Lieberman Syndrome: Public and Private Jewishness in American Political Culture

Shortly after the Second World War, Jewish communities in the Czech lands began to remember the Jewish victims of the conflict through a ceremony called the “tryzna”. This article investigates the structure and timing of tryzny to understand how Czech‐Jews memorialized the tragedy that had recently befallen their community. By 1952, it became standard practice for Jewish communities to host a tryzna in March to commemorate the Nazi liquidation of the so‐called “Czech family camp” at Auschwitz‐Birkenau in 1944. The proliferation of tryzny ensured that Czech‐Jews mourned and commemorated the dead of the Second World War in a religious and then increasingly public way. What began as small community events, coalesced and grew into national mourning ceremonies. Tryzny link a national story of loss and an awareness of the larger Jewish genocide with Jewish funerary practices. These tryzny evolved within a communist state, in a world where the concept of the “Holocaust” had not yet entered international consciousness.     

Physicians' Silent Decisions: Because Patient Autonomy Does Not Always Come First

Physicians make some medical decisions without disclosure to their patients. Nondisclosure is possible because these are silent decisions to refrain from screening, diagnostic or therapeutic interventions. Nondisclosure is ethically permissible when the usual presumption that the patient should be involved in decisions is defeated by considerations of clinical utility or patient emotional and physical well-being. Some silent decisions—not all—are ethically justified by this standard. Justified silent decisions are typically dependent on the physician's professional judgment, experience and knowledge, and are not likely to be changed by patient preferences. We condemn the inappropriate exclusion of the patient from the decision-making process. However, if a test or treatment is unlikely to yield a net benefit, disclosure and discussion are at times unnecessary. Appropriate silent decisions are ethically justified by such considerations as patient benefit or economy of time.     

A Systematic Review of the Literature Exploring Illness Perceptions in Mental Health Utilising the Self-Regulation Model

Psychologists have utilised a range of social cognition models to understand variation in physical health and illness-related behaviours. The most widely studied model of illness perceptions has been the Self-Regulation Model (SRM, Leventhal, Nerenz, & Steele, 1984). The illness perceptions questionnaire (IPQ) and its revised version (IPQ-R) have been utilised to explore illness beliefs in physical health. This review examined 13 quantitative studies, which used the IPQ and IPQ-R in mental health in their exploration of illness perceptions in psychosis, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, depression and adolescents experiencing mood disorders. Across these studies the SRM illness dimensions were largely supported. Mental illnesses were commonly viewed as cyclical and chronic, with serious negative consequences. Perceptions regarding chronicity, controllability and negative consequences were associated with coping and help seeking, while engagement with services and help seeking were also related to illness coherence beliefs. Treatment adherence was linked to beliefs that treatment could control one’s illness. Whilst a major limitation of the reviewed studies was the use of cross-sectional designs, overall the applicability of the SRM to mental health was supported. The IPQ and IPQ-R were shown to be valuable measures of illness perceptions in mental health, offering implications for clinical practice.     

Use of Repertory Grids to Assess Understanding Between Partners in Marital Therapy

Seven couples referred to a clinical psychologist for marital therapy or psychosexual counseling were asked to complete a variety of repertory grid ratings and a marital satisfaction questionnaire. Links between understanding, similarity, perceived similarity, and marital satisfaction were examined; sex differences were also considered. In this small sample, understanding, similarity, and marital satisfaction were not found to be related. The men did tend to be better than the women at predicting their respective partner's grid. These findings are discussed in relation to previous research on marital satisfaction within the personal construct literature.     

Multisensory self‐motion encoding in parietal cortex

Navigation through the environment requires the brain to process a number of incoming sensory signals, such as visual optical flow on the retina and motion information originating from the vestibular organs. In addition, tactile as well as auditory signals can help to disambiguate the continuous stream of incoming information and determining the signals resulting from one's own set of motion. In this review I will focus on the cortical processing of motion information in one subregion of the posterior parietal cortex, i.e., the ventral intraparietal area (VIP). I will review (1) electrophysiological data from single cell recordings in the awake macaque showing how self‐motion signals across different sensory modalities are represented within this area and (2) data from fMRI recordings in normal human subjects providing evidence for the existence of a functionally equivalent area of macaque area VIP in the human cortex.     

Working memory and reasoning: An individual differences perspective

This article reports three experiments that investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and syllogistic and five-term series spatial inference. A series of complex and simple verbal and spatial working memory measures were employed. Correlational analyses showed that verbal and spatial working memory span tasks consistently predicted syllogistic and spatial reasoning performance. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that three factors best accounted for the data—a verbal, a spatial, and a general factor. Syllogistic reasoning performance loaded all three factors, whilst spatial reasoning loaded only the general factor. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of reasoning theories and contemporary accounts of the structure of working memory.     

Predicting the difficulty of complex logical reasoning problems

The aim of the present research was to develop a difficulty model for logical reasoning problems involving complex ordered arrays used in the Graduate Record Examination. The approach used involved breaking down the problems into their basic cognitive elements such as the complexity of the rules used, the number of mental models required to represent the problem, and question type. Weightings for these different elements were derived from two experimental studies and from the reasoning literature. Based on these weights, difficulty models were developed which were then tested against new data. The models had excellent predictive validity and showed the relative influence of rule based factors and factors relating to the number of underlying models. Different difficulty models were needed for different question types, suggesting that people used a variety of approaches and, at a wider level, that both mental models and mental rules may be used in reasoning.     

Not all job demands are equal: Differentiating job hindrances and job challenges in the Job Demands–Resources model

This study aimed to integrate the differentiation between two types of job demands, as made in previous studies, in the Job–Demands Resources (JD-R) model. Specifically, this study aimed to examine empirically whether the differentiation between job hindrances and job challenges, next to the category of job resources, accounts for the unexpected positive relationships between particular types of job demands (e.g., workload) and employees' work engagement. Results of confirmatory factor analyses supported the differentiation between the three categories of job characteristics in two samples (N ₁ = 261 and N ₂ = 441). Further, structural equation modelling confirmed the hypotheses that job hindrances associate positively with exhaustion (i.e., the main component of burnout) and negatively with vigour (i.e., the main component of work engagement). Job resources displayed the reversed pattern of relations. Job challenges were positively related to vigour. Rather unexpectedly, they were unrelated to exhaustion. Based on these findings, we discuss the importance of the differentiation between different types of job demands in the JD-R model for both theory and practice.     

Friendship, Justice, and Aristotle: Some Reasons to Be Sceptical

It is sometimes held that modern institutionally-focussed conceptions of social justice are lacking in one essential respect: they ignore the importance of civic friendship or solidarity. It is also, typically simultaneously, held that Aristotle’s thought provides a fertile ground for elucidating an account of civic friendship. I argue, first, that Aristotle is no help on this score: he has no conception of distinctively civic friendship. I then go on to argue that the Kantian distinction between perfect and imperfect duties is more useful than talk of civic friendship in capturing the non-institutional demands of social justice.