Examining the effects of perceived social support on momentary mood and symptom reports in asthma and arthritis patients

Objective: Social support has been linked to beneficial effects on health directly (main effect) and as a buffer to stress. Most research, however, has examined these relationships using global and retrospective assessments of health and stress, which may be subject to recall biases. This study used ambulatory ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods to test the main and stress-buffering effects of social support on the daily health and well-being of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients.

Design: Community volunteers with asthma (n?=?97) or RA (n?=?31) responded to EMA prompts five times daily for one week.

Main outcomes: Baseline perceived social support was obtained, and then, participants reported mood, stress and symptoms using EMA. Multilevel mixed-modelling examined whether social support predicted mood and symptoms directly or via stress-reducing effects.

Results: Supporting a main effect, more perceived social support predicted decreased negative mood and stress severity. Supporting a stress-buffering effect, more perceived social support resulted in fewer reported symptoms when stress was present.

Conclusion: Results suggest perceived social support directly relates to better ambulatory status and dynamically buffers individuals against the negative effects of stressors, and highlight the importance of studying social support across different temporal and contextual levels.     

No Safe Place

Summary

This article addresses ethical issues associated with the concept of professional and scientific responsibility as related to Principle C, “Integrity” of the APA's 2002 Ethics Code. Differences between aspirational and enforceable ethical standards are noted and contextualized in APA's and other professional society's ethics codes. Three case examples are presented and discussed.     

Ecological issues of justice

In the first part of this article the author explores the implications for justice of the wider range of parties holding moral standing that environmental ethics has recently disclosed. These implications concern the equitable treatment of future generations and nonhuman creatures, and are relevant both to policies, such as approaches to global warming, and procedures, which may need to be revised to give an equitable voice to unrepresented interests. Later the author considers some radical implications of regarding humanity as stewards of the planetary environment, a view defended in his recent book Creation, Evolution and Meaning. If all adult humans have this role, but many are prevented from discharging it by poverty and related constraints, then those who are thus disempowered need to be empowered to exercise this role. This requirement of equity would arise not from their moral patienthood but from what is involved in respecting them as moral agents. Some approaches to tackling global warming are considered in this connection.     

In defense of a regulated market economy

The dominant understanding of political corporate social responsibility (CSR) suggests new, broader political roles for businesses in the globalized economy, challenging the classical liberal social order (where business firms’ task is to focus on economic issues and the government's role is to take care of political responsibilities). In this paper, we show how the major framing of the political CSR discussion not only challenges the classical liberal social order but also goes against the more general political economic perspective of the regulated market economy (where strict and [in most cases] strong boundaries exist between business and politics). We argue that this latter tendency of the political CSR discussion is its main weakness. We introduce a Rawlsian reframing of political CSR that is in line with the idea of a global-regulated market economy and compatible with some of the basic global ethical aims of the political CSR movement.     

快速节俭启发式--基于有限理性和生态理性的简单决策规则

本文阐述了德国“马克斯．普朗克人类发展研究所”以Gerd Gigerenzer教授为代表的“适应行为与认知中心”简称“ABC研究中心(组)”关于判断、推理和决策制定简单启发式研究的理论背景、研究思路和技术路线,着重介绍了该研究中心在有限理性和生态理性假设基础上提出的一系列极富创意的快速节俭启发式规则,并对围绕这些简单决策规则开展的研究活动作了简要介绍。     

Adam Smith,Ethicist

This essay argues that Adam Smith's political economy is premised upon a moral anthropology, and that greater attention to Smith from religious ethicists may both improve Smith scholarship and deepen dialogue on economic themes within the field of religious ethics. It does so first by surveying common readings of Smith and noting that engagement of his work within religious ethics and theology tends to rely on misconceptions prevalent in these readings. It then outlines the moral psychology that links Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations and explains the importance of this moral psychology for Smith's ambivalent analysis of commercial society. Reflecting on the case of Smith's work, it concludes by arguing that attention from religious ethicists may also improve contemporary political economic debates, given that they are often premised upon latent assumptions about moral anthropology.     

“Look around while running!” Attentional focus effects in inexperienced runners

While attentional focus effects on running economy have been shown in different settings for trained athletes, it is unclear how attentional instructions should be formulated to improve running economy for inexperienced runners. The present study was designed to fill this gap and test attentional focus effects in runners with little running experience. An experimental design was implemented and participants ran 4 × 6 min at a slow and fixed running pace with different attentional instructions for each block (video, breathing, running movement, no instruction), while oxygen consumption was measured continuously. The results showed best running economy (lowest oxygen consumption) in the video compared with the breathing and movement condition which goes in line with effects for trained runners. Therefore, inexperienced runners can also profit from directing their attention externally and commonly taught principles such as focusing on the coordination of breathing and stride patterns should be reconsidered.     

SHINTO RESEARCH AND THE HUMANITIES IN JAPAN

Three approaches to scholarship are “scholarship as a way,” which aims at perfection of character; “scholarship as a method,” which clearly limits objects and methods in order to achieve precise perception and new knowledge; and “scholarship as an expression,” which takes various approaches to questions and inquiry. The “humanities” participate deeply and broadly in all three of these approaches. In relation to this view of the humanities, Japanese Shinto is a field of study that yields rich results. As a religion of awe, shrine groves, community, arts, and entertainment, it offers a research field that joins together the study of human beings, nature, society, and expression. Though we elucidate the characteristics of Shinto and its differences with Buddhism, we also draw attention to the seven dimensions of “place, way, beauty, festival, technique, poetry, and ecological wisdom,” and then finally take up “research on techniques of body and mind transformation” as a comprehensive and creative development in the “humanities.”     

Cognitive events in a problem-solving task: a qualitative method for investigating interactivity in the 17 Animals problem

Outside the cognitive psychologist's laboratory, problem-solving is an activity that takes place in a rich web of interactions involving people and artefacts. This interactivity is constituted by fine-grained action–perception cycles, and it allows a reasoner's comprehension of the problem to emerge from a coalition of internal and external resources. Taking an ecological approach to problem-solving, this paper introduces a qualitative method, Cognitive Event Analysis, for studying the fine-grained interactivity between a problem-solving agent and his/her environment. To demonstrate the potential of this method, it is used to study a single subject solving the so-called 17 Animals problem using a material model. The fine-grained procedure allows tracking the solution to a serendipity that was brought about because of the participant's aesthetic considerations and a change in her perceptual figure-ground configuration. While a qualitative single-case method cannot prove specific models of problem-solving, it questions prevalent mentalist models, and it generates new hypotheses on insight problem-solving, because it allows the researcher to attend to outliers and to variability on a fast and fine-grained between-measurement timescale.     

从对立走向统一——生态伦理学发展趋势研究

在生态伦理学研究中,人类中心主义和非人类中心主义围绕自然存在物有无道德地位等问题展开了激烈争论。这种争论的不可调和性及其观点的不可公度性,意味着生态伦理学自身发生了严重的形而上学危机。如何摆脱这一危机,使生态伦理学研究向纵深发展,成为摆在人们面前的一项重要任务。黑格尔关于人的自由意志是一个否定之否定过程的观点为走出这种争论提供了理论依据,马克思关于人与自然界完成本质统一的思想亦为消解这种对立奠定了理论基础。