Unspoken Ethics: A Multi-Religion Group and Building a Public Identity

Dealing with the differences among its participants has been one of the most difficult aspects which the Council for Religious Studies (CONER/SC) has faced. Formed by different religions, the Council was founded in 1998 to assist the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil, in the implementation of Religous Studies in state run schools. As a public identity was necessary to legitimize its purpose to the state and to religious studies teachers, the group had to deal with tensions provoked by the differences among Christians of various denominations and representatives from Catholic and Protestant (among them only one Pentecostal), Hindu, Muslim and Afro-Brazilian religions. The strategies used to avoid conflict and produce an agreed discourse include resort to silence when hot topics were broached and discussion of issues which were considered to be possible to discuss. The article focuses on the ethical values expressed, but not spoken of in this process, and on some challenges to the group's unity.     

Personal Respect, Private Property, And Market Economy: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Hegel

The aim of the present paper is to show that Hegel’s concept of personal respect is of great interest to contemporary Critical Theory. The author first analyzes this notion as it appears in the Philosophy of Right and then offers a new interpretation of the conceptual relation between personal respect and the institutions of (private) property and (capitalist) markets. In doing so, he shows why Hegel’s concept of personal respect allows us to understand markets as possible institutionalizations of this kind of recognition, and why it is compatible with a critique of neoliberal capitalism. He argues that due to these features Hegel’s notion of personal respect is of great interest to theoreticians within the tradition of critical theory.

Visual attention amplifies response priming of pointing movements to color targets

We studied the influence of spatial visual attention on the time course of primed pointing movements. We measured pointing responses to color targets preceded by color stimuli priming either the same response as the target or the opposite response. The effects of visual attention at the prime and target locations were studied by varying both the cue-prime and prime-target intervals when presenting either exogenous attentional cues or, in a separate experiment, endogenous cues whose processing was a precondition for performing the task. Pointing trajectories revealed large priming effects in which pointing responses were first controlled by prime signals and then captured in midflight by target signals. Priming effects were strongly amplified when the relevant prime locations were visually attended at optimal cue-prime SOAs, with attention modulating the entire time course of the primed pointing movements. We propose that visual attention amplifies the earliest waves of visuomotor feedforward information, elicited in turn by primes and by targets.     

From relational equality to personal responsibility

Philosophical Studies - According to relational egalitarians, equality is not primarily about the distribution of some good but about people relating to one another as equals. However, compared...     

On believing indirectly for practical reasons

Philosophical Studies - It is often argued that there are no practical reasons for belief because we could not believe for such reasons. A recent reply by pragmatists is that we can often believe...     

Personality traits and anxiety symptoms: the multilevel trait predictor model

Investigation of relations between personality traits and mental disorders can inform key issues in psychopathology research. However, it has been hindered by extensive correlations among the traits. Building on studies of affect-psychopathology relations (e.g., the tripartite model), an organizational framework is proposed to solve this problem with respect to anxiety pathology. To test the resulting model, associations between four traits (negative emotionality, positive emotionality, anxiety sensitivity, and negative evaluation sensitivity) and four anxiety symptoms (chronic worry, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, panic, and social anxiety) were examined in an undergraduate sample (N=907). Confirmatory factor analyses supported operationalizations of the constructs in this study. Examination of the trait-symptom links using hierarchical multiple regression analyses supported most of the predicted relations. Specifically, negative emotionality emerged as a general predictor that was significantly related to all four symptom dimensions. In contrast, anxiety sensitivity was specific to panic and worry, whereas negative evaluation sensitivity was specific to social anxiety and worry. Finally, positive emotionality was uniquely related to social anxiety. The model accounted for a substantial amount of variance in the symptoms and almost all of the covariation among them.     

Neural correlates of metaphor processing: The roles of figurativeness,familiarity and difficulty

There is currently much interest in investigating the neural substrates of metaphor processing. In particular, it has been suggested that the right hemisphere plays a special role in the comprehension of figurative (non-literal) language, and in particular metaphors. However, some studies find no evidence of right hemisphere involvement in metaphor comprehension (e.g. [Lee, S. S., & Dapretto, M. (2006). Metaphorical vs. literal word meanings: fMRI evidence against a selective role of the right hemisphere. NeuroImage, 29, 536–544; Rapp, A. M., Leube, D. T., Erb, M., Grodd, W., & Kircher, T. T. J. (2004). Neural correlates of metaphor processing. Cognitive Brain Research, 20, 395–402]). We suggest that lateralization differences between literal and metaphorical language may be due to factors such as differences in familiarity ([Schmidt, G. L., DeBuse, C. J., & Seger, C. A. (2007). Right hemisphere metaphor processing? Characterizing the lateralization of semantic processes. Brain and Language, 100, 127–141]), or difficulty ([Bookheimer, S. (2002). Functional MRI of language: New approaches to understanding the cortical organization of semantic processing. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 25, 151–188; Rapp, A. M., Leube, D. T., Erb, M., Grodd, W., & Kircher, T. T. J. (2004). Neural correlates of metaphor processing. Cognitive Brain Research, 20, 395–402]) in addition to figurativeness. The purpose of this study was to separate the effects of figurativeness, familiarity, and difficulty on the recruitment of neural systems involved in language, in particular right hemisphere mechanisms. This was achieved by comparing neural activation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) between four conditions: literal sentences, familiar and easy to understand metaphors, unfamiliar and easy to understand metaphors, and unfamiliar and difficult to understand metaphors. Metaphors recruited the right insula, left temporal pole and right inferior frontal gyrus in comparison with literal sentences. Familiar metaphors recruited the right middle frontal gyrus when contrasted with unfamiliar metaphors. Easy metaphors showed higher activation in the left middle frontal gyrus as compared to difficult metaphors, while difficult metaphors showed selective activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus as compared to easy metaphors. We conclude that the right hemisphere is involved in metaphor processing and that the factors of figurativeness, familiarity and difficulty are important in determining neural recruitment of semantic processing.     

Theory‐Driven Subgroup‐Specific Evaluation of an Intervention to Reduce Private Car Use1

In the context of a 2‐wave panel study, we used Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior (TPB) as the theoretical framework for deriving and systematically testing hypotheses as to how an intervention (a “free” ticket for public transportation) influences the travelmode choice of students. The empirical results show that this intervention caused a drastic decrease in students' car use. The effect of the intervention on behavior is mediated by the causal chain postulated by the TPB. In the second step, we analyzed whether there were subgroup‐specific reactions to the intervention. Surprisingly, the subgroup analysis shows that students with more negative attitudes toward policy measures restricting car use reacted more strongly to the intervention than did students with a more positive attitude.     

Information Integration in Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences During Online Language Comprehension

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker's pragmatic competence. In a series of eye‐tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top–down information ‐ (knowledge about the particular speaker's pragmatic competence)  and bottom‐up cues  (distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment). We find that bottom‐up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says “the big dog” in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener's contrastive inferences, with or without top‐down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication.