Aroused at Home: Basic Autonomic Regulation during Orthostatic and Physical Activation is Altered in Children with Social Anxiety Disorder

Previous research has documented altered autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity to laboratory-based social stress tasks in children with social anxiety disorder (SAD). It is unclear, however, whether these alterations are caused by the unfamiliar and possibly threatening lab environment or whether they generalize to other, more representative contexts. Sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic functioning was assessed in the home (minimizing environmental threat) during a supine baseline phase and two physical activation phases (orthostatic stress, stair stepping) in children (9–13 years) with SAD (n?=?27) and healthy control children (n?=?27). Relative to controls, children with SAD showed tonic autonomic hyperarousal as indicated by higher heart rate and electrodermal activity during the supine baseline phase. Further, there was evidence for stronger cardiac and vascular sympathetic reactivity (T-wave amplitude, pulse wave transit time) to moderate physical activation in children with SAD. Higher autonomic arousal during rest was related to measures of trait social anxiety and general psychopathology. Groups did not differ on parasympathetic parameters. Our results extend previous laboratory findings and provide the first evidence for alterations in children with SAD during basal autonomic regulation and in the absence of explicit social evaluative threat. They may further help to clarify conflicting study results from previous laboratory studies. The findings underline the importance of psychophysiological assessment using different environments and tasks to elucidate the physiological bases of SAD.     

Companion Animal Ethics: A Special Area of Moral Theory and Practice?

Considerations of ethical questions regarding pets should take into account the nature of human-pet relationships, in particular the uniquely combined features of mutual companionship, quasi-family-membership, proximity, direct contact, privacy, dependence, and partiality. The approaches to ethical questions about pets should overlap with those of animal ethics and family ethics (and, for veterinary issues, with healthcare ethics), and so need not represent an isolated field of enquiry, but rather the intersection of those more established fields. This intersection, and the questions of how we treat our pets, present several unique concerns and approaches for focused examination.     

Disaggregated pluralistic theories of global distributive justice – a critique

Pluralistic theories of global distributive justice aim at justifying a plurality of principles for various subglobal contexts of distributive justice. Helena de Bres has recently proposed the class of disaggregated pluralistic theories, according to which we should refrain from defending principles that apply to the shared background conditions of such subglobal contexts. This article argues that if one does not justify how these background conditions should be regulated by principles of a just global basic structure, then the (apparent) realization of the principles that are justified for the subglobal contexts of distributive justice can erode and undermine justice over time. For example, the realization of justice in international trade might undermine climate justice, at least if climate justice requires increasing tariffs (in order to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions) but justice in international trade calls for reducing tariffs (in order to create a level playing field). Principles of a just global basic structure would have to ensure that such justice-eroding spillover effects from one to another context of justice do not occur. Finally, the article responds critically to de Bres’ objections that an account of a just global basic structure is too idealistic, not action guiding, and superfluous.     

Folk theory of social change

People have a folk theory of social change (FTSC). A typical Western FTSC stipulates that as a society becomes more industrialized, it undergoes a natural course of social change, in which a communal society marked by communal relationships becomes a qualitatively different, agentic society where market‐based exchange relationships prevail. People use this folk theory to predict a society's future and estimate its past, to understand contemporary cross‐cultural differences, and to make decisions about social policies. Nonetheless, the FTSC is not particularly consistent with the existing cross‐cultural research on industrialization and cultural differences, and needs to be examined carefully.     

Distributing Responsibility in the Debate on Sustainable Biofuels

In the perception of technology innovation two world views compete for domination: technological and social determinism. Technological determinism holds that societal change is caused by technological developments, social determinism holds the opposite. Although both were quite central to discussion in the philosophy, history and sociology of technology in the 1970s and 1980s, neither is seen as mainstream now. They do still play an important role as background philosophies in societal debates and offer two very different perspectives on where the responsibilities for an ethically sound development of novel technologies lie. In this paper we will elaborate on these to two opposing views on technology development taking the recent debate on the implementation of biofuels as a case example.     

The philosophy of simulation: hot new issues or same old stew?

Computer simulations are an exciting tool that plays important roles in many scientific disciplines. This has attracted the attention of a number of philosophers of science. The main tenor in this literature is that computer simulations not only constitute interesting and powerful new science, but that they also raise a host of new philosophical issues. The protagonists in this debate claim no less than that simulations call into question our philosophical understanding of scientific ontology, the epistemology and semantics of models and theories, and the relation between experimentation and theorising, and submit that simulations demand a fundamentally new philosophy of science in many respects. The aim of this paper is to critically evaluate these claims. Our conclusion will be sober. We argue that these claims are overblown and that simulations, far from demanding a new metaphysics, epistemology, semantics and methodology, raise few if any new philosophical problems. The philosophical problems that do come up in connection with simulations are not specific to simulations and most of them are variants of problems that have been discussed in other contexts before. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Interacting effects of worry and anxiety on attentional disengagement from threat

Recent work suggests that the ability to disengage attention from threatening information is impaired in people who suffer from anxiety and dysphoria. It has been suggested that this impaired ability to disengage from threat might specifically be associated with the tendency to perseverate about threat (i.e., worry), which is a main characteristic of anxiety disorders and a wide range of other psychopathologies. However, no studies have yet addressed this issue. The present study examined whether trait worry as well as worry intensity after experimental worry induction are associated with impaired ability to disengage attention from threatening cues (angry faces), independently from or in conjunction with anxiety. Sixty-one participants performed a visual cueing experiment that required detection of a target stimulus at one of two possible locations. Prior to the target neutral, happy or angry facial cues appeared at one of these two locations; when there is a relatively long period between the cue and the target (>300 ms), an overall faster responding to invalidly cued trials relative to validly cued trials is believed to indicate inhibition of return (IOR) to a recently attended location. A reduced IOR for angry faces was only found when both trait worry and anxiety were high. When anxiety was kept constant, both trait worry and state worry were associated with enhanced IOR for neutral faces instead. The results seem to suggest that specific threat-related deficiencies in IOR may be a function of the co-occurrence of worry and anxiety.     

Modes of action of family interventions in depression and schizophrenia: the same or different?

The role of relatives' expressed emotion (EE) in mediating the efficacy of family interventions has been studied in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving people with schizophrenia and depression. Reanalysis of two RCTs (n=48) by Leff (1989) indicated that lowering relatives' EE and/or reducing social contact between the patient and family members accounted for the efficacy of the intervention for schizophrenia. However, this relationship has not been investigated previously with regard to depression, and this paper presents the results of a recent RCT which included measurement of EE and other possible mediating variables. In this study, amelioration of the critical attitude of the partner did not account for the superiority of couples therapy over antidepressant medication, since the same change occurred in the drug group. However, reducing the patient's exposure to the partner's hostility partially explained the efficacy of couples therapy. Further research on the process of change in families undergoing therapy is indicated to identify the variables that account for the efficacy of therapy.