Intercessory Prayer on Spiritual Distress,Spiritual Coping,Anxiety, Depression and Salivary Amylase in Breast Cancer Patients During Radiotherapy: Randomized Clinical Trial

The goal of this study was to assess the effect of intercessory prayer in the psychological, spiritual and biological scores of breast cancer patients who are undergoing radiotherapy. Double-blind RCT comprising a sample of 31 participants (15 in the Control Group and 16 in the Intervention Group). Data collection was performed in three time points (T₀, T₁ and T₂). Significant changes have been identified in the intra-group analysis, concerning the decrease in spiritual distress score; negative religious/spiritual coping prevailed, while the total religious/spiritual coping increased between the posttest T₂ to T₀. Intercessory prayer was effective in religious and spiritual scores.

     

Value and Obligation Once More

In Understanding Moral Obligation (2012), Robert Stern sets out to provide a fresh interpretation of the role of autonomy in Kant's moral philosophy and attempts to rectify J. B. Schneewind's standard account in The Invention of Autonomy (1998). While Stern agrees that Kant's resort to autonomy is at the basis of a constructivist account of moral obligation, he claims that autonomy plays no role in Kant's theory of value, such that, in this respect, Kant remains a realist. Accordingly, Stern characterizes Kant's moral philosophy as a “hybrid” view because he sees it as involving a compromise between realism with regard to value and constructivism with regard to obligation. Stern's interpretation relies on a sharp distinction between value and obligation. The purpose of the present article is to question Stern's reliance on that rigid distinction, which involves intermixing theoretical and practical reason and assumes a distorted view of human agency.     

Extending the Basic Local Independence Model to Polytomous Data

Psychometrika - A probabilistic framework for the polytomous extension of knowledge space theory (KST) is proposed. It consists in a probabilistic model, called polytomous local independence model,...     

The Hahn Embedding Theorem for a Class of Residuated Semigroups

Studia Logica - Hahn’s embedding theorem asserts that linearly ordered abelian groups embed in some lexicographic product of real groups. Hahn’s theorem is generalized to a class of...     

Effect of autonomy support and dialogic learning on school children’s physical activity and sport

This study applies an intervention based on autonomy support through dialogic learning to examine effects on motivation and the promotion of physical activity and sport involvement during schoolchildren’s leisure time. One hundred and two primary school students, aged 11–13 years, participated (M = 10.93, SD = 0.75). The sample was divided into two groups: an experimental group (49 students) and a control group (53 students). A quasi-experimental study was conducted in physical education classes over the course of 9 months. Assessments of autonomy support from teachers, family, and peers; basic psychological needs; self-determined motivation in physical education and during leisure time; planned behavior variables; physical activity intention; and estimated and actual physical exercise behavior time were included in the model. Following the intervention, the results revealed that greater autonomy support by the teacher, the family and peers, satisfaction of the basic psychological needs, self-determined motivation during physical education class and during free time, greater perceived control, favorable attitude and intention to engage in physical activity contributed to the explanation of student physical activity involvement. These results suggest that when students receive extensive social support from diverse social agents that essential precursors to physical activity are strengthened and contribute to increased motivation and actual physical activity involvement. Efforts to promote effective communications with students and other pedagogical efforts, such as providing dialogic learning opportunities, should be considered in order to strengthen physical activity motivation and involvement in students.     

Does Partisan Bias Modulate Neural Processing of Political Information? An Analysis of the Neural Correlates of Corruption and Positive Messages

Daily worldwide newspapers print articles exposing government corruption. Yet these messages do not lead to a loss of votes for the corrupt parties. Sympathizers’ partisan bias, which respectively minimizes and maximizes corruption and positive messages of their own parties respectively, is widely considered the main cause of the loss of effectiveness of political communications. Despite the well-established existence of such bias when processing political information, little is known as to its psychological origin. Through the use of neuroscience (fMRI), this study explores the underlying brain mechanisms of negative (corruption) and positive political messages related to a conservative and a socialist Spanish political party, as well as the differences between their sympathizers. The findings reveal that negative (vs. positive) political messages exert the greatest neuroimaging impact on the electorate, as shown in aversive, risk, and disappointment-related brain regions. Interestingly, we show that there exists a main partisan bias against opposite parties (and not a positive bias toward one’s own party) that stems from a higher risk, ambiguity, and disbelief provoked by both positive and negative information about rival parties. Furthermore, this bias was more pronounced among conservative supporters. The current findings provide valuable insights for political parties to improve their communication campaigns.     

Gender Attitudes and Public Opinion Towards Electoral Gender Quotas in Brazil

Research on public opinion towards affirmative action shows that citizens often support the principle of equality while simultaneously rejecting policies that promote it in a pattern described as the “principle-policy puzzle.” The scholarship also shows that ideology and prejudice towards the targeted group explain the puzzle with respect to racial affirmative action. In this article, we use unique survey questions included in the 2014 round of the AmericasBarometer in Brazil to show that citizens tend to support electoral gender quotas while rejecting gender-based egalitarianism in a reversed version of the “principle-policy puzzle.” We argue that a different type of gender attitudes, namely benevolent sexism, shapes support for gender quotas as well as for the principle of equality. While benevolent sexists tend to reject gender equality based on views about gender complementarity and stereotypes about women's purity, they also support quotas as policies to foster such values. Our findings suggest that even though the political and scholarly debates can provide sound normative reasons for the adoption of quotas across different contexts, public support for them often relies on paternalistic views and expectations about the role of women in politics.     

Truth Without Reference: The Use of Fictional Names

Topoi - Singular terms without referents are called empty or vacuous terms. But not all of them are equally empty. In particular, not all proper names that fail to name an existing object fail in...     

Precise Worlds for Certain Minds: An Ecological Perspective on the Relational Self in Autism

Topoi - Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many...     

The attitudinal view and the integration of the particular object of emotions

In recent years, Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni have proposed to understand emotions as embodied evaluative attitudes we take towards objects that figure in nonevaluative representational states. Although their account nicely explains some of the key features that emotions are widely taken to have, it runs into a version of what I call the problem of integration. In the case of the attitudinal view, the integration problem takes the form of explaining how, from the point of view of the subject, the bodily responses that make up the attitude part of the emotion and the representational states that provide the particular object of the emotion come to form an intentionally structured unitary experience, that is, one in which the bodily responses are intentionally directed towards the object. I argue that what explains this integration is the way in which the experience of bodily responses and the experience of the representational states interact. This, I propose, produces what I call an experience of convergence. I also suggest that understanding emotional experience in this way not only solves the problem of the integration but also provides a more solid ground for the claim that emotions qua embodied attitudes are evaluative.