Rumination, fear, and cortisol: an in vivo study of interpersonal transgressions.

The authors sought to examine whether rumination about psychologically painful, though nontraumatic, interpersonal transgressions is associated with increased salivary cortisol. They measured salivary cortisol, rumination about a transgression, fear and anger regarding the transgressor, perceived painfulness of the transgression, and positive and negative mood in 115 undergraduates who had experienced an interpersonal transgression during the previous 7 days. They obtained measurements on as many as 5 occasions separated by approximately 14 days each. On occasions when participants reported that they had been ruminating to a degree that was greater than was typical for them, they had higher levels of salivary cortisol than was typical for them. The rumination- cortisol association appeared to be mediated by fear of the transgressor. Rumination about even moderately painful but nontraumatic life events and associated emotions are related to biological changes that may subserve social goals such as avoiding social threats. Items from the rumination scale are appended.     

Review of Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up Without Losing Your Way

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Basements and Intersections

In this paper, I revisit Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) to recover a companion metaphor that has been largely forgotten in the “mainstreaming” of intersectionality in (white‐dominated) feminist theory. In addition to the now‐famous intersection metaphor, Crenshaw offers the basement metaphor to show how—by privileging monistic, mutually exclusive, and analogically constituted categories of “race” and “sex” tethered, respectively, to masculinity and whiteness—antidiscrimination law functions to reproduce social hierarchy, rather than to remedy it, denying Black women plaintiffs legal redress. I argue that in leaving the basement behind, deployments of “intersectionality” that deracinate the concept from its origins in Black feminist thought also occlude Crenshaw's account of the socio‐legal reproduction of hierarchical power.     

On the Logic of Acceptance and Rejection

The logic of acceptance and rejection (AEL2) is a nonmonotonic formalism to represent states of knowledge of an introspective agent making decisions about available information. Though having much in common, AEL2 differs from Moore's autoepistemic logic (AEL) by the fact that the agent not only can accept or reject a given fact, but he/she also has the possibility not to make any decision in case he/she does not have enough knowledge.