Reasons-responsiveness and degrees of responsibility

Ordinarily, we take moral responsibility to come in degrees. Despite this commonplace, theories of moral responsibility have focused on the minimum threshold conditions under which agents are morally responsible. But this cannot account for our practices of holding agents to be more or less responsible. In this paper we remedy this omission. More specifically, we extend an account of reasons-responsiveness due to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza according to which an agent is morally responsible only if she is appropriately receptive to and reactive to reasons for action. Building on this, we claim that the degree to which an agent is responsible will depend on the degree to which she is able to recognize and react to reasons. To analyze this, we appeal to relations of comparative similarity between possible worlds, arguing that the degree to which an agent is reasons-reactive depends on the nearest possible world in which given sufficient reason to do otherwise, she does so. Similarly, we argue that the degree to which an agent is reasons-receptive will depend on the intelligibility of her patterned recognition of reasons. By extending an account of reasons-responsiveness in these ways, we are able to rationalize our practice of judging people to be more or less responsible.     

Memory as discrimination: What distraction reveals

Recalling information involves the process of discriminating between relevant and irrelevant information stored in memory. Not infrequently, the relevant information needs to be selected from among a series of related possibilities. This is likely to be particularly problematic when the irrelevant possibilities not only are temporally or contextually appropriate, but also overlap semantically with the target or targets. Here, we investigate the extent to which purely perceptual features that discriminate between irrelevant and target material can be used to overcome the negative impact of contextual and semantic relatedness. Adopting a distraction paradigm, it is demonstrated that when distractors are interleaved with targets presented either visually (Experiment 1) or auditorily (Experiment 2), a within-modality semantic distraction effect occurs; semantically related distractors impact upon recall more than do unrelated distractors. In the semantically related condition, the number of intrusions in recall is reduced, while the number of correctly recalled targets is simultaneously increased by the presence of perceptual cues to relevance (color features in Experiment 1 or speaker’s gender in Experiment 2). However, as is demonstrated in Experiment 3, even presenting semantically related distractors in a language and a sensory modality (spoken Welsh) distinct from that of the targets (visual English) is insufficient to eliminate false recalls completely or to restore correct recall to levels seen with unrelated distractors . Together, the study shows how semantic and nonsemantic discriminability shape patterns of both erroneous and correct recall.     

Effects of emotion regulation on concurrent attentional performance

We explored the attentional demands of unpleasant picture viewing and emotion regulation strategies. Participants received instructions to view, reappraise, or suppress their emotional experience to unpleasant and neutral pictures, while performing a concurrent auditory discrimination task, both during and after the picture presentation period. Reaction times (RTs) were slower during unpleasant than neutral pictures, which persisted into the post-picture period. RTs were also slower during reappraisal and suppression than viewing and for earlier than later tones following picture onset. An enduring effect of negative emotion was found in the picture and post picture period for suppression but not reappraisal. Findings suggest that both viewing emotional stimuli and regulating one’s emotions using either reappraisal or suppression draw upon common attentional resources, but with suppression resulting in the distinct cost of maintaining the effects of negative emotion.     

Managing Physical and Sexual Assault Risk in Urban Nightlife: Individual- and Environmental-Level Influences

In this article we use interview and direct observation data to examine the experiences of young people in two Philadelphia nightlife scenes, and the ways in which they manage risk of physical and sexual assault. Our analysis reveals several environmental-level factors that shape risk exposure, as well as a number of individual-level tactics used to manage risk. Our observations are discussed in terms of their implications for developing a risk management framework that accounts for the role of individual- and environmental-level factors in shaping victimization.     

Reduce temptation or resist it? Experienced temptation mediates the relationship between implicit evaluations of unhealthy snack foods and subsequent intake

A more negative implicit evaluation of unhealthy food stimuli and a more positive implicit evaluation of a weight-management goal have been shown to predict lower consumption of unhealthy food. However, the associations between these evaluations, temptation to indulge and consumption of unhealthy food remain unclear. The current study investigated whether temptation would mediate the relationship between implicit food and goal evaluations and consumption (resembling an antecedent-focused route to self-control of eating), or whether those evaluations would moderate the relationship between temptation and consumption (resembling a response-focused route). A sample of 156 women (17–25 years), who tried to manage their weight through healthy eating, completed two implicit association tasks assessing implicit food and goal evaluations, respectively. Intake of four energy-dense snack foods was measured in a task disguised as a taste test, and participants reported the strength of experienced temptation to indulge in the snacks offered. Negative implicit food evaluation was associated with lower snack intake, and temptation mediated this relationship. Implicit goal evaluation was unrelated to both temptation strength and snack consumption. The findings contribute to an understanding of how negative implicit unhealthy food evaluation relates to lower consumption, namely through the mediation of temptation to indulge in those foods.     

The evolution of the primates: Anglicanism,primacy and conciliarity

Contemporary debate about the relationship between civil and religious law, highlighted by the Archbishop of Canterbury's 2008 lecture on ‘Civil and Religious Law in England’, prompts a reassessment of the place of ius divinum in the understanding of the nature of law. This article questions the assumption of modernity that there is no place for divine law, and briefly surveys the different role played by divine law in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It examines the contrasting Christian perspectives of Aquinas and Duns Scotus, which leads to a critique of the relationship between personal welfare and the common good. Since, in the context of post-modernism, questions related to divine law are once again being addressed, the article criticises aspects of a fundamentalist approach to it in both Islam and Christianity. It argues that, from a Christian perspective, the personal truth of Jesus Christ embodies the place where the divine freedom comes into relation with human freedom. It concludes that in reflecting on a common praxis for humanity, it is this embodied relationship which provides the basic perspective for practitioners of canon law to contribute in a significant way to the debate now gathering momentum.     

Barth and Darwin: What is Humanity?

Abstract

Karl Barth proposed that secular texts including scientific theories could be understood as parables of aspects of the revealed truth not as such available to natural science. I explore that suggestion, seeking to understand what human biology in succession to the work of Charles Darwin has to contribute alongside Barth's doctrine of the human person.     

Cracking the Code: Using Personal Narratives in Research

The use of personal narratives in research across the field of psychology has dramatically increased in recent years. In studies spanning a wide range of topics, personal event narratives have provided especially valuable insights into the processes and products of cognitive development. This article offers a guide for researchers who might use personal narratives in research currently or in the future. Issues and best practices surrounding collecting, transcribing, and coding personal narratives are presented. Practical challenges, commonly used methods, and recommended guidelines are described. Illustrations of different types of personal narrative coding systems are offered. The article also highlights benefits of and resources for conducting personal narrative research.     

Irrelevant sensory stimuli interfere with working memory storage: Evidence from a computational model of prefrontal neurons

The encoding of irrelevant stimuli into the memory store has previously been suggested as a mechanism of interference in working memory (e.g., Lange & Oberauer, Memory, 13, 333–339, 2005; Nairne, Memory & Cognition, 18, 251–269, 1990). Recently, Bancroft and Servos (Experimental Brain Research, 208, 529–532, 2011) used a tactile working memory task to provide experimental evidence that irrelevant stimuli were, in fact, encoded into working memory. In the present study, we replicated Bancroft and Servos’s experimental findings using a biologically based computational model of prefrontal neurons, providing a neurocomputational model of overwriting in working memory. Furthermore, our modeling results show that inhibition acts to protect the contents of working memory, and they suggest a need for further experimental research into the capacity of vibrotactile working memory.