Determinants of depressive mood states in everyday life: An experience sampling study

This study tests relative contributions and time-course of proposed risk/protective factors (e.g., stress, coping, and lack of social interactions) for influencing depressed mood states in daily life. Seventy-three participants completed baseline measurement of major depressive disorder symptomatology, followed by smartphone app-based monitoring of momentary experiences of depressed mood and risk/protective factors for 7 days. All predictors had deteriorating impacts on mood as lag increased, and the optimal lag appears to be less than 120 min. Linear decay in effect sizes was found for physical activity, social interaction, and tiredness, whereas exponential decline in effect sizes was found for stress and coping ability. Stress, coping, and depressed mood at the prior time-point were the best predictors of subsequent mood. These effects did not differ as a function of trait depressive symptom severity. Findings highlight the influence of spacing of assessments in identification and magnitude of predictors of mood states, and provide insights into key drivers of change in mood and their time-course.     

Autonomy and moral deference

The idea that a person might have a duty to defer to the moral judgments of others is typically something that arouses our suspicion, in ways that other kinds of deference do not. One explanation for this is the value of autonomy. According to this explanation, people have a duty to be autonomous, and any act of deferring to another person’s moral judgement is not an autonomous action. Call this “the Autonomy Argument” against moral deference. In this article, I criticise the Autonomy Argument. I argue that, even if we accept that an act of moral deference can never be autonomous, those who believe that people have a duty to be autonomous must accept that acts of moral deference are morally necessary. This is because some people are incapable of becoming autonomous by themselves, and deferring to a moral expert is the only way they might ever become autonomous.     

Rights Forfeiture Theorists Should Embrace the Duty View of Punishment

In this paper, I bring into conversation with each other two views about the justification of punishment: the rights forfeiture theory and the duty view. I argue that philosophers attracted to the former should instead accept the latter.     

Information‐Theoretic Measures Predict the Human Judgment of Rhythm Complexity

To formalize the human judgment of rhythm complexity, we used five measures from information theory and algorithmic complexity to measure the complexity of 48 artificially generated rhythmic sequences. We compared these measurements to human prediction accuracy and easiness judgments obtained from a listening experiment, in which 32 participants guessed the last beat of each sequence. We also investigated the modulating effects of musical expertise and general pattern identification ability. Entropy rate and Kolmogorov complexity were correlated with prediction accuracy, and highly correlated with easiness judgments. A logistic regression showed main effects of musical training, entropy rate, and Kolmogorov complexity, and an interaction between musical training and both entropy rate and Kolmogorov complexity. These results indicate that information‐theoretic concepts capture some salient features of the human judgment of rhythm complexity, and they confirm the influence of musical expertise on complexity judgments.     

Pictures,perspective and possibility

This paper argues for a possible worlds theory of the content of pictures, with three complications: depictive content is centred, two-dimensional and structured. The paper argues that this theory supports a strong analogy between depictive and other kinds of representation and the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance.     

Worldviews and individual vulnerability to suicide: The role of social axioms

Research investigating the role of generalized beliefs about the world or worldviews is relatively scarce in the suicide literature. Two studies, using Hong Kong Chinese samples, examined how worldviews, as assessed by the Social Axioms Survey (SAS), were linked with individual vulnerability to suicide. In Study 1, we investigated the relationships of social axioms with various suicide indicators in cognitive, emotional and interpersonal domains, viz., suicidal ideation, negative self‐esteem, psychache, burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. Results from canonical correlation analysis showed that beliefs along the axiom dimensions of social cynicism, reward for application, and social complexity were linked to these suicide indicators. In Study 2, we tested the interplay of worldviews and personality traits in the prediction of suicidal thoughts. Hierarchical regression results demonstrated the predictive power of social axioms over and above that provided by the Big Five personality dimensions. Moreover, a significant interaction was observed between belief in reward for application and negative life events in predicting suicidal ideation, showing that reward for application buffered the effect of negative life events on suicidal ideation. Based on these results, we discussed the significance of worldviews as a consideration in suicide research and their implications for clinical assessment and intervention. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fairness Between Competing Claims

Fairness is a central, but under-theorized, notion in moral and political philosophy. This paper makes two contributions. Firstly, it criticizes Broome’s seminal account of fairness in (1990–1991) Proc Aristotelian Soc 91:87–101, showing that there are problems with restricting fairness to a matter of relative satisfaction and holding that it does not itself require the satisfaction of the claims in question. Secondly, it considers the justification of lotteries to resolve cases of ties between competing claims, which Broome claims as support for his theory, and contrasts random procedures to contests of skill, which may also be considered lotteries in a broader sense. I offer no alternative account of fairness of my own, but hope to point the way for future research on the nature of fairness.     

Étude des effets cognitifs et affectifs de l’alphabétisation chez des adultes dans un contexte tunisien

This paper explores some of the cognitive and affective repercussions of literacy in the case of young Tunisian adults. I have evaluated the cognitive skills of 133 subjects, who are in the most part young women aged between 16 and 35 and assigned to different literacy levels. The framework of my investigation is informed by such fields as inductive reasoning, phonemic and semantic organisation and the capacity of storing and retrieving verbal information. I have appraised the intensity of the subjects’ depressive feelings so as to assess their emotional state. My aim is to demonstrate the positive impact literacy has on cognitive capacities as far as the above-mentioned fields are concerned. By the same token, I have underscored a concomitant effect upon the subjects’ emotional condition, for the intensity of illiterate people's feelings of depression is more exacerbated than in literate subjects’ case.