Psychological predictors of problem mobile phone use.

Mobile phone use is banned or illegal under certain circumstances and in some jurisdictions. Nevertheless, some people still use their mobile phones despite recognized safety concerns, legislation, and informal bans. Drawing potential predictors from the addiction literature, this study sought to predict usage and, specifically, problematic mobile phone use from extraversion, self-esteem, neuroticism, gender, and age. To measure problem use, the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale was devised and validated as a reliable self-report instrument, against the Addiction Potential Scale and overall mobile phone usage levels. Problem use was a function of age, extraversion, and low self-esteem, but not neuroticism. As extraverts are more likely to take risks, and young drivers feature prominently in automobile accidents, this study supports community concerns about mobile phone use, and identifies groups that should be targeted in any intervention campaigns.     

Experimental Philosophy of Explanation Rising: The Case for a Plurality of Concepts of Explanation

This paper brings together results from the philosophy and the psychology of explanation to argue that there are multiple concepts of explanation in human psychology. Specifically, it is shown that pluralism about explanation coheres with the multiplicity of models of explanation available in the philosophy of science, and it is supported by evidence from the psychology of explanatory judgment. Focusing on the case of a norm of explanatory power, the paper concludes by responding to the worry that if there is a plurality of concepts of explanation, one will not be able to normatively evaluate what counts as good explanation.     

Parental bonding and personality disorder: the mediating role of alexithymia

This study explored whether alexithymic features mediate the effect of perceived adverse parenting during childhood on being diagnosed with a PD in adulthood. Two hundred sixty-five psychiatric outpatients were evaluated with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), the Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders, the Clinical Global Impression scale, and the Global Assessment of Functioning scale. The statistical model for mediation proposed by Baron and Kenny (1986) was employed to detect whether the TAS scores account for the relation between PBI scores and a PD diagnosis. The results indicated that although altered parental bonding (and specifically, excessive maternal protection) may enhance the risk of PD, its effect is completely mediated by the alexithymic feature Difficulty Describing Feelings to Others (DDF), after controlling for gender, age, educational level, type, severity and age of onset of Axis I disorders. Therefore, this study suggests that the presence of DDF accounts for the effect of maternal overprotection as a risk factor for PD.     

Action-dependent perceptual invariants: from ecological to sensorimotor approaches

Ecological and sensorimotor theories of perception build on the notion of action-dependent invariants as the basic structures underlying perceptual capacities. In this paper we contrast the assumptions these theories make on the nature of perceptual information modulated by action. By focusing on the question, how movement specifies perceptual information, we show that ecological and sensorimotor theories endorse substantially different views about the role of action in perception. In particular we argue that ecological invariants are characterized with reference to transformations produced in the sensory array by movement: such invariants are transformation-specific but do not imply motor-specificity. In contrast, sensorimotor theories assume that perceptual invariants are intrinsically tied to specific movements. We show that this difference leads to different empirical predictions and we submit that the distinction between motor equivalence and motor-specificity needs further clarification in order to provide a more constrained account of action/perception relations.     

Combining finite and infinite elements: Why do we use infinite idealizations in engineering?

Synthese - This contribution sheds light on the role of infinite idealization in structural analysis, by exploring how infinite elements and finite element methods are combined in civil engineering...     

Are the effects of attention on speed judgments genuinely perceptual?

A number of studies in recent years have suggested that exogenous and endogenous attention might enhance the perceived magnitude of various perceptual attributes, such as contrast and motion speed. Those studies have generally used comparative judgments as a measure to assess the point of subjective equality; however, similarity judgments have been proposed as possibly less prone to decision biases (Schneider & Komlos, 2008). In three experiments, using a similarity judgment task, we did not find any evidence of motion speed enhancement by exogenous attention. We suggest that the effect revealed by comparative judgments arises at the decisional, rather than the perceptual, stage.     

Sexual topologies in the Aristotelian cosmos: revisiting Irigaray’s physics of sexual difference

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no “place of their own,” rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, the paper rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity.     

La musica contemporanea statunitense e i suoi elementi fenomenologici

This article seek to highlight the aspects — explicit or implicit — that indicate the close attention paid by much American musicology of this century to the phenomenological level of musical events or, more generally, of the sound event. Starting from general considerations on American music and some of its protagonists, the article focuses on Elliott Carter, on his poetics, and on his theories expressed in his writings.Carter's compositional choices and his consciousness of the intrinsic complexity they assume theoretically provide a starting point for a phenomenological study of many aspects of compositional experience: from consideration of instrumental language with its structural phenomenological (and historical) implications, to more global evaluation of the centrality of temporal and rhythmic subjects.Carter's music corresponds to the theories of many American phenomenologists of music. This also proves the community of interests evident in United States both in music and phenomenological theories.     

Husserl on Meaning,Grammar, and the Structure of Content

Husserl’s Logical Grammar is intended to explain how complex expressions can be constructed out of simple ones so that their meaning turns out to be determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the way they are put together. Meanings are thus understood as structured contents and classified into formal categories to the effect that the logical properties of expressions reflect their grammatical properties. As long as linguistic meaning reduces to the intentional content of pre-linguistic representations, however, it is not trivial to account for how semantics relates to syntax in this context. In this paper, I analyze Husserl’s Logical Grammar as a system of recursive rules operating on representations and suggest that the syntactic form of representations (both mental and linguistic) contributes to their semantics because it carries information about semantic role. I further discuss Husserl’s syntactic account of the unity of propositions and argue that, on this  account, logical form supervenes on syntactic form. In the last section I draw some implications for the phenomenology of thought and conjecture that the structural features it displays are likely to convey the syntactic structures of an underlying language-like representational system.