The Extended Body: The Social Body of Jesus according to Luke1

Abstract : Informed by body phenomenology and contemporary concepts of the social body, this article aims to interpret the particular movements and transformations of Jesus’ body as presented in the Gospel of Luke. From the outset Jesus’ body is inscribed in a Jewish genealogy. Likewise, the Gospel depicts the character of Jesus via the various landscapes he passes through as well as through the social interactions of which he is a part. While Jesus’ body is initially described as being energized by the mobile presence of the Spirit, it increasingly closes in and, at the end, simply disappears. Luke describes Jesus’ ascension and resurrection as radical transformations of Jesus’ body, by which Jesus’ body‐and‐mind (Leib) extends into a social body, at home in God as well as among his followers. This social body also crosses the genetic and cultural boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Only through this extensiveness can Jesus’ body become accessible worldwide.     

Using brain-computer interfaces to overcome the extinction of goal-directed thinking in minimally conscious state patients

Minimally conscious state (MCS) is a condition of severely altered consciousness, in which patients appear to be wakeful and exhibit fluctuating but reproducible signs of awareness. MCS patients do not respond and are therefore dependent on others. In agreement with the embodied cognition assumption that motor actions influence our cognition, the absence of movement and the decrease in consequences for any type of covert or overt response may cause an extinction of goal-directed thinking. Brain-computer interfaces, which allow a direct output without muscular involvement, may be used to promote goal-directed thinking by allowing the performance of spatial and motor imagery tasks and could facilitate the interaction of MCS patients with their environment, possibly regaining some degree of communication and autonomy.     

When does procedural fairness promote organizational citizenship behavior? Integrating empowering leadership types in relational justice models

We examined how procedural fairness interacts with empowering leadership to promote employee OCB. We focused on two core empowering leadership types—encouraging self-development and encouraging independent action. An experiment revealed that leaders encouraging self-development made employees desire status information more (i.e., information regarding one’s value to the organization). Conversely, leaders encouraging independent action decreased employees’ desire for this type of information. Subsequently, a multisource field study (with a US and German sample) showed that encouraging self-development strengthened the relationship between procedural fairness and employee OCB, and this relationship was mediated by employees’ self-perceived status. Conversely, encouraging independent action weakened the procedural fairness-OCB relationship, as mediated by self-perceived status. This research integrates empowering leadership styles into relational fairness theories, highlighting that multiple leader behaviors should be examined in concert and that empowering leadership can have unintended consequences.     

Personal identity: birth,death and the conditions of selfhood

Continental Philosophy Review - What makes us the same person across time? The different solutions to this problem known as personal identity can be divided into two camps: A numerical and a...     

Religiousness and Religious Coping in a Secular Society: The Gender Perspective

Women are found to be more religious than men and more likely to use religious coping. Only few studies have explored religious gender differences in more secular societies. This population-based study comprised 3,000 Danish men and women (response rate 45 %) between 20 and 40 years of age. Information about demographics, religiousness and religious coping was obtained through a web-based questionnaire. We organized religiousness in the three dimensions: Cognition, Practice and Importance, and we assessed religious coping using the brief RCOPE questionnaire. We found substantial gender differences in both religiousness and religious coping. Nearly, 60 % of the women believed in some sort of spirit or in God compared to 40 % of the men. Generally, both men and women scored low on the RCOPE scale. However, for respondents reporting high levels of religiousness, the proportion of men who scored high in the RCOPE exceeded the proportion of women in using positive and especially negative coping strategies. Also, in a secular society, women are found to be more religious than men, but in a subset of the most religious respondents, men were more inclined to use religious coping. Further studies on religious coping in secular societies are required.     

PROSPECTS FOR THE FIELD OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION: AN OCTOPUS VIEW

The organic unity between the head and the vital arms of the octopus is proposed as a metaphor for science and religion as an academic field. While the specific object of the field is to pursue second‐order reflections on existing and possible relations between sciences and religions, it is argued that several aspects of realism and normativity are constitutive to the field. The vital arms of the field are related to engagements with distinctive scientific theories, specialized philosophy of science, representative theological proposals, and the input from the study of world religions.     

From face to face: the contribution of facial mimicry to cognitive and emotional empathy

ABSTRACT

Despite advances in the conceptualisation of facial mimicry, its role in the processing of social information is a matter of debate. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between mimicry and cognitive and emotional empathy. To assess mimicry, facial electromyography was recorded for 70 participants while they completed the Multifaceted Empathy Test, which presents complex context-embedded emotional expressions. As predicted, inter-individual differences in emotional and cognitive empathy were associated with the level of facial mimicry. For positive emotions, the intensity of the mimicry response scaled with the level of state emotional empathy. Mimicry was stronger for the emotional empathy task compared to the cognitive empathy task. The specific empathy condition could be successfully detected from facial muscle activity at the level of single individuals using machine learning techniques. These results support the view that mimicry occurs depending on the social context as a tool to affiliate and it is involved in cognitive as well as emotional empathy.     

On the counterfactual nature of envy: “It could have been me”

We examined whether counterfactual thinking influences the experience of envy. Counterfactual thinking refers to comparing the situation as it is to what it could have been, and these thought processes have been shown to lead to a variety of emotions. We predicted that for envy the counterfactual thought “it could have been me” would be important. In four studies we found a clear link between such counterfactual thoughts and the intensity of envy. Furthermore, Studies 3 and 4 revealed that a manipulation known to affect the extent of counterfactual thinking (the perception of being close to obtaining the desired outcome oneself), had an effect on the intensity of envy via counterfactual thoughts. This relationship between counterfactual thinking and the experience of envy allows for new predictions concerning situations under which envy is likely be more intense.