Art and the ‘Morality System’: The Case of Don Giovanni

Mozart's great opera, Don Giovanni, poses a number of significant philosophical and aesthetic challenges, and yet it remains, for the most part, little discussed by contemporary philosophers. A notable exception to this is Bernard Williams's important paper, ‘Don Juan as an Idea’, which contains an illuminating discussion of Kierkegaard's ground‐breaking interpretation of the opera, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical‐Erotic’, in Either/Or. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author's (A) approach here is, in some respects, reminiscent of a currently rather fashionable narrative‐inspired moral philosophy, of which Williams himself is perhaps the most impressive recent exponent. In the light of this apparent methodological confluence, Williams's disagreement with A about the meaning of Don Giovanni's final two scenes seems particularly significant. By offering an interpretation of Don Giovanni that both retains A's fundamental ideas and manages to get round the problems in Williams's account, I will show that the greatness of Mozart's opera is largely a function of the challenge it presents to the ‘morality system’.     

Triple Bottomline Many‐Objective‐Based Decision Making for a Land Use Management Problem

A land use many‐objective optimization problem for a 1500‐ha farm with 315 paddocks was formulated with 14 objectives (maximizing sawlog production, pulpwood production, milksolids, beef, sheep meat, wool, carbon sequestration, water production, income and Earnings Before Interest and Tax; and minimizing costs, nitrate leaching, phosphorus loss and sedimentation). This was solved using a modified Reference‐point‐based Non‐dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II augmented by simulated epigenetic operations. The search space had complex variable interactions and was based on economic data and several interoperating simulation models. The solution was an approximation of a Hyperspace Pareto Frontier (HPF), where each non‐dominated trade‐off point represented a set of land‐use management actions taken within a 10‐year period and their related management options, spanning a planning period of 50 years. A trade‐off analysis was achieved using Hyper‐Radial Visualization (HRV) by collapsing the HPF into a 2‐D visualization capability through an interactive virtual reality (VR)‐based method, thereby facilitating intuitive selection of a sound compromise solution dictated by the decision makers' preferences under uncertainty conditions. Four scenarios of the HRV were considered emphasizing economic, sedimentation and nitrate leaching aspects—giving rise to a triple bottomline (i.e. the economic, environmental and social complex, where the social aspect is represented by the preferences of the various stakeholders). Highlights of the proposed approach are the development of an innovative epigenetics‐based multi‐objective optimizer, uncertainty incorporation in the search space data and decision making on a multi‐dimensional space through a VR‐simulation‐based visual steering process controlled at its core by a multi‐criterion decision making‐based process. This approach has widespread applicability to many other ‘wicked’ societal problem‐solving tasks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Neurophysiologic markers of primary motor cortex for laryngeal muscles and premotor cortex in caudal opercular part of inferior frontal gyrus investigated in motor speech disorder: a navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study

Transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have so far reported the results of mapping the primary motor cortex (M1) for hand and tongue muscles in stuttering disorder. This study was designed to evaluate the feasibility of repetitive navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) for locating the M1 for laryngeal muscle and premotor cortical area in the caudal opercular part of inferior frontal gyrus, corresponding to Broca’s area in stuttering subjects by applying new methodology for mapping these motor speech areas. Sixteen stuttering and eleven control subjects underwent rTMS motor speech mapping using modified patterned rTMS. The subjects performed visual object naming task during rTMS applied to the (a) left M1 for laryngeal muscles for recording corticobulbar motor-evoked potentials (CoMEP) from cricothyroid muscle and (b) left premotor cortical area in the caudal opercular part of inferior frontal gyrus while recording long latency responses (LLR) from cricothyroid muscle. The latency of CoMEP in control subjects was 11.75 ± 2.07 ms and CoMEP amplitude was 294.47 ± 208.87 µV, and in stuttering subjects CoMEP latency was 12.13 ± 0.75 ms and 504.64 ± 487.93 µV CoMEP amplitude. The latency of LLR in control subjects was 52.8 ± 8.6 ms and 54.95 ± 4.86 in stuttering subjects. No significant differences were found in CoMEP latency, CoMEP amplitude, and LLR latency between stuttering and control-fluent speakers. These results indicate there are probably no differences in stuttering compared to controls in functional anatomy of the pathway used for transmission of information from premotor cortex to the M1 cortices for laryngeal muscle representation and from there via corticobulbar tract to laryngeal muscles.     

Majoring in Selection,and Minoring in Socialization: The Role of the College Experience in Goal Change Post–High School

Though it is frequently assumed that the college experience can influence our life goals, this claim has been relatively understudied. The current study examined the role of goals in college major selection, as well as whether major selection influences later goal change. In addition, we examined whether a person's perceptions of his or her peers' goals influence goal setting. Using a sample of German students (M_age = 19 years; n = 3,023 at Wave 1), we assessed life goal levels and changes from high school into college across three assessment occasions. Participants reported their current aspirations, along with the perceived goals of their peers during the college assessments. Using latent growth curve models, findings suggest that life goals upon entering college significantly predict the majors students select. However, this major selection had limited influence on later changes in life goals. Stronger effects were found with respect to perceptions of peers' goals, with students tending to change their goals to better align with their peers. The current study provides evidence that life goals are relatively stable and yet can change during the emerging adult years, in ways that demonstrate the potential influence of the college experience.     

Meaning and Conversational Impropriety in Sceptical Contexts

According to “disjunctivist neo‐Mooreanism”—a position Duncan Pritchard develops in a recent book—it is possible to know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses, even though it is conversationally inappropriate to claim such knowledge. In a recent paper, on the other hand, Pritchard expounds an “überhinge” strategy, according to which one cannot know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, as “hinge propositions” are necessarily groundless. The present article argues that neither strategy is entirely successful. For if a proposition can be known, it can also be claimed to be known. If the latter is not possible, this is not because certain propositions are either “intrinsically” conversationally inappropriate (as Pritchard claims in his book) or else “rationally groundless” (as Pritchard claims in his paper), but rather that we are dealing with something that merely presents us with the appearance of being an epistemic claim.     

Effect of attention control on sustained attention during induced anxiety

Anxiety has wide-reaching and complex effects on cognitive performance. Although it can intrude on cognition and interfere with performance, it can also facilitate information processing and behavioural responses. In a previous study, we showed that anxiety induced by threat of shock facilitates performance on the Sustained Attention to Response Task, a vigilance test, which probes response inhibition to infrequent nogo stimuli. The present study sought to identify factors that may have contributed to such improved performance, including on- and off-task thinking (assessed with thought probes) and individual differences in attention control, as measured with the Attention Control Scale. Replicating our prior finding, we showed that shock threat significantly reduced errors of commission on the nogo trials. However, we extended this finding in demonstrating that this effect was driven by subjects with low attention control. We therefore confirm that anxiety increases inhibitory control of prepotent responses—a mechanism which is adaptive under threat—and show that this effect is greater in those who rely more upon such prepotent responding, i.e., those with low attentional control.     

Performing a secondary executive task with affective stimuli interferes with decision making under risk conditions

Previous studies demonstrated that executive functions are crucial for advantageous decision making under risk and that therefore decision making is disrupted when working memory capacity is demanded while working on a decision task. While some studies also showed that emotions can affect decision making under risk, it is unclear how affective processing and executive functions predict decision-making performance in interaction. The current experimental study used a between-subjects design to examine whether affective pictures (positive and negative pictures compared to neutral pictures), included in a parallel executive task (working memory 2-back task), have an impact on decision making under risk as assessed by the Game of Dice Task (GDT). Moreover, the performance GDT plus 2-back task was compared to the performance in the GDT without any additional task (GDT solely). The results show that the performance in the GDT differed between groups (positive, negative, neutral, and GDT solely). The groups with affective pictures, especially those with positive pictures in the 2-back task, showed more disadvantageous decisions in the GDT than the groups with neutral pictures and the group performing the GDT without any additional task. However, executive functions moderated the effect of the affective pictures. Regardless of affective influence, subjects with good executive functions performed advantageously in the GDT. These findings support the assumption that executive functions and emotional processing interact in predicting decision making under risk.     

Social Competence in Children with Brain Disorders: A Meta-analytic Review

Social competence, i.e. appropriate or effective social functioning, is an important determinant of quality of life. Social competence consists of social skills, social performance and social adjustment. The current paper reviews social skills, in particular emotion recognition performance and its relationship with social adjustment in children with brain disorders. In this review, normal development and the neuro-anatomical correlates of emotion recognition in both healthy children and adults and in various groups of children with brain disorders, will be discussed. A systematic literature search conducted on PubMed, yielded nine papers. Emotion recognition tasks were categorized on the basis of task design and emotional categories to ensure optimal comparison across studies before an explorative meta-analysis was conducted. This meta-analytic review suggests that children with brain disorders show impaired emotion recognition, with the recognition of sad and fearful expressions being most impaired. Performance did not seem to be related to derivative measures of social adjustment. Despite the limited number of studies on a variety of brain disorders and control groups, outcomes were quite consistent across analyses and corresponded largely with the existing literature on development of emotion recognition in typically developing children. More longitudinal prospective studies on emotion recognition are needed to gain insight into recovery and subsequent development of children with distinct brain disorders. This will aid development, selection and implementation of interventions for improvement of social competence and quality of life in children with a brain disorder.