Women's Physiological Reactions to Physically Demanding Work

Eight females ( age = 20 yrs.) were subjects in an experiment consisting of two parts. The first part measured the maximal work capacity and peak work load on a treadmill at a speed of 8 kms (5 mph) with grade increasing 2 1/2% every 3 minutes. The second part measured energy expended on a treadmill walked under varying conditions of speed, grade, and load in an eight hour day of strenuous work. The results showed that these women were able to do strenuous work expending 2369 kcals for 8 1/2 hours. The energy expended exceeded that required for most physically demanding occupations. The results have implications for vocational choice research for women who have been excluded from occupations due to an assumed lack of strength.     

An Accuracy Based Approach to Higher Order Evidence

The aim of this paper is to apply the accuracy based approach to epistemology to the case of higher order evidence: evidence that bears on the rationality of one's beliefs. I proceed in two stages. First, I show that the accuracy based framework that is standardly used to motivate rational requirements supports steadfastness—a position according to which higher order evidence should have no impact on one's doxastic attitudes towards first order propositions. The argument for this will require a generalization of an important result by Greaves and Wallace for the claim that conditionalization maximizes expected accuracy. The generalization I provide will, among other things, allow us to apply the result to cases of self‐locating evidence. In the second stage, I develop an alternative framework. Very roughly, what distinguishes the traditional approach from the alternative one is that, on the traditional picture, we're interested in evaluating the expected accuracy of conforming to an update procedure. On the alternative picture that I develop, instead of considering how good an update procedure is as a plan to conform to, we consider how good it is as a plan to make. I show how, given the use of strictly proper scoring rules, the alternative picture vindicates calibrationism: a view according to which higher order evidence should have a significant impact on our beliefs. I conclude with some thoughts about why higher order evidence poses a serious challenge for standard ways of thinking about rationality.     

Mozambican immigrants to South Africa: Their xenophobia and discrimination experiences

We explored Mozambican immigrants’ lived experiences of xenophobia and discrimination in South Africa. Informants were 15 Mozambican immigrants (female = 7, male = 8) living in an informal settlement in Zandspruit, Gauteng Province. They completed open-ended written narratives on xenophobic and discriminatory experiences. Following thematic analysis, we identified three themes to characterise the Mozambican immigrants’ experiences of xenophobia and discrimination: (i) abusive attitudes, (ii) ethnic discrimination, and (iii) scapegoating. The Mozambican immigrants’ experiences of xenophobia and discrimination are consistent with findings from the extant international literature on ingroup/outgroup social strife with real or perceived scarcity of resources.     

Risk seeking for losses modulates the functional connectivity of the default mode and left frontoparietal networks in young males

Value-based decision making (VBDM) is a principle that states that humans and other species adapt their behavior according to the dynamic subjective values of the chosen or unchosen options. The neural bases of this process have been extensively investigated using task-based fMRI and lesion studies. However, the growing field of resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) may shed light on the organization and function of brain connections across different decision-making domains. With this aim, we used independent component analysis to study the brain network dynamics in a large cohort of young males (N = 145) and the relationship of these dynamics with VBDM. Participants completed a battery of behavioral tests that evaluated delay aversion, risk seeking for losses, risk aversion for gains, and loss aversion, followed by an RSFC scan session. We identified a set of large-scale brain networks and conducted our analysis only on the default mode network (DMN) and networks comprising cognitive control, appetitive-driven, and reward-processing regions. Higher risk seeking for losses was associated with increased connectivity between medial temporal regions, frontal regions, and the DMN. Higher risk seeking for losses was also associated with increased coupling between the left frontoparietal network and occipital cortices. These associations illustrate the participation of brain regions involved in prospective thinking, affective decision making, and visual processing in participants who are greater risk-seekers, and they demonstrate the sensitivity of RSFC to detect brain connectivity differences associated with distinct VBDM parameters.     

Religious orientation and coping with cancer

In this study we investigated the role of religious orientation in coping with stresses associated with cancer. A measure of daily coping and the Religious Orientation scale were administered to forty hematology-oncology patients in order to examine frequency of eight coping responses across religious orientations. It was found that proreligious and intrinsic participants used religion significantly more often than nonreligious and extrinsic types to cope with stresses associated with their cancer. We concluded that religious orientation and commitment influence the coping process, and suggest that religious commitment be included in studies of coping with cancer.     

Internalism without Luminosity1

Internalists face the following challenge: what is it about an agent's internal states that explains why only these states can play whatever role the internalist thinks these states are playing?  Internalists have frequently appealed to a special kind of epistemic access that we have to these states. But such claims have been challenged on both empirical and philosophical grounds.  I will argue that internalists needn't appeal to any kind of privileged access claims.  Rather, internalist conditions are important because of the way in which we expect them to act as causal mediators between states of the world, on the one hand, and our beliefs and actions on the other.     

Coherent plaids are preattentively more than the sum of their parts

We investigated whether plaids activate preattentive mechanisms that are distinct from those activated by their component gratings. Observers searched for a target plaid, the sum of two perpendicular components in a circular window (radius = 0.65°). The target was present on half the trials. On all trials, half of the distractors had the same frequency and orientation as one component of the plaid, and the rest were the same as the other component. The target and the distractors were arrayed evenly on a circle (radius = 2.36°) around fixation. Target and distractor contrasts were randomly perturbed up to ±30%. The following results held for each of the 6 participants tested. (1) When F1 = 2 c/deg and F2 = 5.25 c/deg, response times (RTs) increased significantly when set size (number of distractors plus target, if present) was increased from four to eight. (2) When the spatial frequencies of both plaid components were the same (i.e., both 2 c/deg or both 5.25 c/deg), RTs increased very slightly, if at all, when set size was increased from four to eight. These results suggest the existence of a preattentive, plaid-sensitive mechanism with band-limited input that does not respond to individual grating components.     

Being In Front Is Good—But Where Is In Front? Preferences for Spatial Referencing Affect Evaluation

Speakers of English frequently associate location in space with valence, as in moving up and down the “social ladder.” If such an association also holds for the sagittal axis, an object “in front of” another object would be evaluated more positively than the one “behind.” Yet how people conceptualize relative locations depends on which frame of reference (FoR) they adopt—and hence on cross-linguistically diverging preferences. What is conceptualized as “in front” in one variant of the relative FoR (e.g., translation) is “behind” under another variant (reflection), and vice versa. Do such diverging conceptualizations of an object's location also lead to diverging evaluations? In two studies employing an implicit association test, we demonstrate, first, that speakers of German, Chinese, and Japanese indeed evaluate the object “in front of” another object more positively than the one “behind.” Second, and crucially, the reversal of which object is conceptualized as “in front” involves a corresponding reversal of valence, suggesting an impact of linguistically imparted FoR preferences on evaluative processes.