评《实用神经伦理学:增进对于心脑的治疗和理解》

介绍了《实用神经伦理学:增进对于心脑的治疗和理解》一书的主要内容,分析了该书的思想路线.在作者看来,书中通过经验研究清晰地展示出神经科学研究同临床实践以及社会文化互动的方式和结果,成功证实了生命伦理学研究在神经科学中的重要意义.同时,作者指出了该书在论证上存在的矛盾和缺陷,以及时某些哲学理论的误读.     

Learning difficulties,social intelligence,and self-concept: connections to bully-victim problems

Learning skills, social intelligence, and self-concept were related to each other and to bully-victim problems among fifth-grade children (79 boys and 62 girls, aged 11-12 years). In addition to exploring connections between single variables, a person-oriented approach was applied in order to analyze children's value patterns with respect to learning skills, self-concept, and social intelligence, and how these value patterns are related to bully-victim problems. Social intelligence was found to be positively correlated with learning skills, but negatively related to victimization. Bullying was positively correlated with self-concept scores. However, this was true only of boys. According to cross-tabulations, there were significantly more bullies among children with learning difficulties (LD) than would have been expected by chance. Victimization, on the other hand, was not related to LD. LD children's proposed victim status was in some degree supported by cluster analysis: a group of LD children emerged, who not only scored high on bullying, but also tended to be victimized by others. In addition, two groups of bullies appeared: one whose members could be interpreted as socially unskilled and another as socially skilled. This finding is in line with recent theoretical reasoning, which calls into question the idea of bullies as a unified group, lacking in social skills.     

Visual processing of coherent rotation in the central visual field: an fMRI study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to determine the brain areas that process coherent motion. To reduce the activity related to eye-movement planning and self-motion perception, rotation was used as coherent motion and the stimulus was restricted to the central visual field. Coherent rotation relative to incoherent random-dot motion resulted in consistent activation in the superior parietal lobule (SPL), in the lateral occipital gyrus (presumptive kinetic occipital region, KO), and in the fusiform gyrus (FG). The main novel finding in present study is the bilateral SPL activation, which has not been found in any previous study contrasting coherent and incoherent motion. It is suggested that the SPL activation is related to form-from-motion processing. The stimulus modification that prevented abrupt appearances of dots at the borders of the stimulus field increased the strength of rolling disk-like percept of the coherent stimulus. This perception of form may also be at least partly responsible for the activation in KO and FG. With this explanation, our three consistent activation areas are in line with previous findings. Furthermore, these results demonstrate that even delicate changes in some stimulus aspects can lead to significant changes in the activation of the brain.     

Leibnizian Soft Reduction of Extrinsic Denominations and Relations

Leibniz, it seems, wishes to reduce statements involving relations or extrinsic denominations to ones solely in terms of individual accidents or, respectively, intrinsic denominations. His reasons for this appear to be that relations are merely mental things (since they cannot be individual accidents) and that extrinsic denominations do not represent substances as they are on their own. Three interpretations of Leibniz's reductionism may be distinguished: First, he allowed only monadic predicates in reducing statements (hard reductionism); second, he allowed also `implicitly relational predicates' such as `loves somebody' (soft reductionism); third, he allowed also `explicitly relational predicates' such as `loves Helen' (nonreductionism). Hard reductionism is problematic with respect to Leibniz's doctrines of universal expression and incompossibility (among other things). Nonreductionism, in turn, faces insurmountable problems with Leibniz's doctrine of self-sufficiency and internal identification of substances, as well as with that of individual accidents. The remaining option, soft reductionism, standing between the other two interpretations, arguably avoids at least some of their problems.     

A behavioral medicine intervention as an adjunctive treatment for HIV-related illness

Abstract

This investigation assessed the efficacy of a behavioral medicine intervention in the adjunctive treatment of symptomatic HIV seropositive men. Twenty-six, well coping, seropositive gay males were randomly assigned to either a treatment group or a waiting list control group. The treatment group received eight weeks of training in thermal biofeedback, guided imagery and hypnosis Significant results (p < 0.05) indicated that HIV-related symptoms (fever, fatigue, pain, headache, nausea and insomnia) decreased and that vigor and hardiness increased. No significant changes were found in absolute numbers of CD4 cells, tension-anxiety or depression.     

World Assumptions Following Disaster1

This study assessed the beliefs and cognitions of bus-train collision survivors, 7 years following the accident. The sample consisted of 389 young adults who were adolescents at the time of the disaster. The sample was composed of 4 groups who differed in their levels of exposure to traumatic stress. Results indicated that (a) exposure to the traumatic accident was implicated in challenging survivors' beliefs about the benevolence of the world. Justice and luck were also associated with posttraumatic psychiatric and functional impairment; (b) the level of exposure had a direct bearing on dependent variables; and (c) cognitive schemata were associated with psychiatric symptomatology and problems in functioning, reflecting the coexistence of diverse traumatic sequelae. Theoretical implications of these results are discussed.     

Mortality Salience and Perceptions of People with AIDS: Understanding the Role of Prejudice

Study 1 examined the perceived association of AIDS and death by showing that thinking about AIDS increased participants'; death-thought accessibility. Hypotheses about the consequences of this association for perceptions of people with AIDS were derived from terror management theory, which proposes that mortality salience increases derogation of those who threaten people's worldviews unless those worldviews oppose prejudice, in which case mortality salience can increase acceptance of people who are otherwise threatening. Consistent with these hypotheses, conservative participants had less favorable impressions (Study 2) and liberal participants had more favorable impressions (Study 3) of a target with AIDS following a death reminder. Study 4 suggested that the decrease in prejudice among liberals following mortality salience was a genuine decrease in prejudice (as indicated by responses to an unobtrusive attitude measure), not just an increase in the desire to appear nonprejudiced. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

South American Evangelicals’ Re-conquest of Europe

This article focuses on networks of South-American preachers, led by charismatic characters such as the Argentinean pastor Carlos Annacondia, who export themselves not only to countries within the Americas but also to Europe. The prevailing justification among Latin-American Evangelicals for undertaking this ‘reverse mission’ (Freston) is in the view that especially the ‘old’ Roman Catholic Europe is spiritually ‘cooled down’ and that the time is ripe for re-evangelizing it. This study analyzes the way in which network-based charismatic entrepreneurship has encouraged transnational imaginaries of re-conquering Europe spiritually, more specifically in terms of the meanings the members of these networks attribute to the ‘spiritual re-conquest’. I conclude by suggesting that, similar to flows from other regions in the global South, such as Africa, the much vaunted ‘reverse mission’ to Europe is vested with meanings that transcend the spiritual re-conquest as such. In the case of Latin America, this article argues, the chief motivation is symbolic: to strengthen the status of local churches and their leaders against the backdrop of a highly competitive religious market on the Latin-American sub-continent.