L. Klaus

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global stressor with inter-individually differing influences on mental health trajectories. Polygenic Risk Scores (PRSs) for psychiatric phenotypes are associated with individual mental health predispositions. Elevated hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) and high PRSs are related to negative mental health outcomes. We analyzed whether PRSs and HCC are related to different mental health trajectories during the first COVID lockdown in Germany. Among 523 participants selected from the longitudinal resilience assessment study (LORA), we previously reported three subgroups (acute dysfunction, delayed dysfunction, resilient) based on weekly mental health (GHQ-28) assessment during COVID lockdown. DNA from blood was collected at the baseline of the original LORA study (n = 364) and used to calculate the PRSs of 12 different psychopathological phenotypes. An explorative bifactor model with Schmid-Leiman transformation was calculated to extract a general genetic factor for psychiatric disorders. Hair samples were collected quarterly prior to the pandemic for determining HCC (n = 192). Bivariate logistic regressions were performed to test the associations of HCC and the PRS factors with the reported trajectories. The bifactor model revealed 1 general factor and 4 sub-factors. Results indicate a significant association between increased values on the general risk factor and the allocation to the acute dysfunction class. The same was found for elevated HCC and the exploratorily tested sub-factor “childhood-onset neurodevelopmental disorders”. Genetic risk and long-term cortisol secretion as a potential indicator of stress, indicated by PRSs and HCC, respectively, predicted different mental health trajectories. Results indicate a potential for future studies on risk prediction.

Crises and public health emergencies can have devastating and wide-ranging impacts across healthcare, social, cultural, economic and political contexts. Against this backdrop, many research ethics and research integrity challenges can be exacerbated, and new ones can emerge as researchers and other stakeholders find themselves in testing and unstable environments. Learning from these challenges, to prepare for similar future crises, requires a broad perspective and encompassing vision. It also requires careful identification and analysis of challenges to ensure that guidance for future crises has real-world applicability. A risk-based approach to ethics code development begins with the identification of ethics risks or challenges, which itself requires extensive research. This chapter describes the research foundation upon which the PREPARED Code was built. It presents an overview of the results of an in-depth review of published literature in nine languages, additional scoping reviews on Ebola and avian flu, investigations into the challenges experienced by groups who were disadvantaged during the COVID-19 pandemic, an analysis of the human rights challenges in the context of sudden global crises, an investigation into how one pharmaceutical company overcame governance challenges to produce a vaccine in record time, and an analysis of pandemic research ethics guidance documents. Together the findings from these activities constituted a strong foundation for the development of the PREPARED Code.

Neuroenhancement beschreibt ganz allgemein die Einnahme von psychoaktiven Substanzen oder den Einsatz anderer neurowissenschaftlicher Techniken (z. B. transkranielle Magnetstimulation) mit dem Ziel der geistigen Leistungssteigerung. Für die Einnahme psychoaktiver Substanzen zur geistigen Leistungssteigerung wird auch der Begriff pharmakologisches Neuroenhancement (PN) verwendet. Die derzeitige Situation der Anwendung von PN bei Gesunden, Prävalenz, Motivation der Einnahme und Wissensstand über PN, die tatsächliche Effektivität sowie die moralischen Implikationen der aktuellen Debatte bilden den Gegenstand dieses Kapitels.

The COVID-19 pathogen led to a fast expanding pandemic because it proved lethal in certain populations but could be transmitted by persons who appeared healthy. As a result, researchers came under unprecedented time pressure to develop a vaccine. This case study focuses on the first COVID-19 vaccine, which was approved for use in humans, known as Comirnaty, the BioNTech-Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine or Vaccine BNT162b2. With the benefit of hindsight, we show how close collaboration with regulators and trust-based decisions meant that the race for a COVID-19 vaccine was won without purposefully infecting healthy participants with an infectious agent that can cause severe illness or death and for which no rescue therapy had existed.

George Spencer Brown, a polymath and author of Laws of Form, brought together mathematics, electronics, engineering and philosophy to form an unlikely bond. This book investigates Design with the NOR, the title of the yet unpublished 1961 typescript by Spencer Brown. The typescript formed through the author's experiences as technical engineer and developer of a new form of switching algebra for Mullard Equipment LTD., a British manufacturer of electronic components. Related essays contextualise the typescript drawing on a variety of backgrounds from mathematics and engineering to philosophy and sociology.

Cultural and biographical influences on the expression of emotions manifest themselves in so-called “display rules.” These rules determine the time, intensity, and situations in which an emotion is expressed. To date, only a small number of empirical studies deal with this transformation of how migrants, who are faced with a new culture, may change their emotional expression. The present, cross-sectional study focuses on changes in anger expression as part of a complex acculturation process among Iranian migrants. To this end, Iranian citizens in Iran, German citizens, and Iranian migrants in Germany were compared in terms of anger expression behavior and acculturation strategy was assessed among the migrants, using the Frankfurt Acculturation Scale. A questionnaire developed in a preliminary study was used to measure anger expression via subjective anger experience and anger expression within 16 hypothetical situations. Multivariate Analyses of Variance revealed that Iranians and Iranian migrants reported higher anger experience ratings than Germans and directed their anger more often inward. Further findings suggest that transformation processes may have affected Iranian migrants in terms of suppressed anger : Iranian migrants with a higher orientation toward German culture reported lower average anger-in scores. These results suggest that there was different emotional expression among Iranian migrants, depending on their acculturation. The results provide new insight into socio-cultural and individual adjustment processes.

Mild signs of postpartum depression or anxiety are present in up to half of all new mothers. However, the impact of having the “baby blues” on infant development remains largely unknown. The current study explores a potential relation between mother’s self-reported depression or anxiety symptoms and infant’s motor development in a longitudinal sample of 50 mother-infant dyads. Further, we examine whether engaging in fetal kick counting during pregnancy may reduce maternal psychopathology symptoms and thereby positively influence infant motor development and parent-child engagement during the first months of life. We hypothesized that subclinical maternal psychopathology would negatively impact infant motor development, and that completing a fetal kick count activity during the third trimester would reduce overall signs of maternal psychopathology. Results only partially support these hypotheses. Postpartum maternal anxiety seems to negatively affect the emergence of infants’ fine motor skills. However, engaging in fetal kick counting during pregnancy did not reduce maternal depression or anxiety symptoms. Nevertheless, preliminary evidence suggests that engaging in fetal kick counting may impact early child development by altering the mother’s attitudes toward the child. Future research is needed to examine the value of this low-cost intervention strategy more closely.

The independence of research is a key strategic issue of modern societies. Dealing with it appropriately poses legal, economic, political, social and cultural problems for society, which have been studied by the corresponding disciplines and are increasingly the subject of reflexive discourses of scientific communities. Unfortunately, problems of independence are usually framed in disciplinary contexts without due consideration of other perspectives’ relevance or possible contributions. To overcome these limitations, we review disciplinary perspectives and findings on the independence of research and identify interdisciplinary prospects that could inform a research programme.

Since a number of years, popular and scientific interest in resilience is rapidly increasing. More recently, also neuroscientific research in resilience and the associated neurobiological findings is gaining more attention. Some of these neuroscientific findings might open up new measures to foster personal resilience, ranging from magnetic stimulation to pharmaceutical interventions and awareness-based techniques. Therefore, bioethics should also take a closer look at resilience and resilience research, which are today philosophically under-theorized. In this paper, we analyze different conceptualizations of resilience and argue that especially one-sided understandings of resilience which dismiss social and cultural contexts of personal resilience do pose social and ethical problems. On a social level such unbalanced views on resilience could hide and thereby stabilize structural social injustices, and on an individual level it might even lead to an aggravation of stress-related mental health problems by overexerting the individual. Furthermore, some forms of fostering resilience could be a latent form of human enhancement and trigger similar criticisms.

Patients participate in clinical trials for a variety of reasons, the first of which is often the prospect of direct health Benefit for themselves. Healthy volunteers, by definition, cannot expect such benefits. In resource-limited settings, healthy volunteers are most often poor people with low literacy levels who might not understand the Risks they may be taking and are in no position to refuse Financial incentives. For many of them, participation in clinical trials is a critical source of income. An added complication is that some participants covertly enrol in several studies simultaneously, in order to increase their income. This exposes the volunteers to medical risks, and also potentially biases study Data. Our recommendations are that specific efforts are made to ensure proper informed Consent of this Vulnerable population and that compulsory national databases be established to ensure that healthy volunteers do not participate simultaneously in several studies.

In contrast to other approaches, `modernity' in this article is not dealt with as a historical concept but as a normative-aesthetic term and as a mythical narrative in the sense of Nietzsche's `eternal recurrence of the same'. Paradoxically, there still exists a semantic shift between different historical concepts of modernity beginning in late antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the present confusions about `postmodernity'. However, the aesthetical bias of the discourse of modernity prevents any serious interpretation which is able to refer these semantic shifts directly to some clear and incontestable socio-structural facts and developments. In its contemporary sociological form this discourse overlaps on the contrary with some main trends in aesthetic theory and practice: the exchangeability between `old' and `new' and the permanent suspension of the boundaries between `art' and `life'. Consequently, aesthetics as well as sociology are describing modernity as a cultural system which is `playing' with its own fundamental differentiations between `in' and `out' or self-reference and other-reference

Plato’s Phaidon, as generally held, is set in Phlius (northern Argolis), shortly after the death of Socrates: the scarcely twenty-year-old Phaidon (see 89b2), on his way from Athens to his home town of Elis, is visiting the Pythagorean Echecrates and his companions. In this article I will show that the established place and time neglect some special dynamics of the start of the meeting (Section I) and a series of ethopoietic effects in the course of the dialogue (Section II). Moreover, relevant testimonies about Echecrates of Phlius and some adverbial references (especially 118a16 τότε) suggest that the dramatic time of the dialogue should be understood as set substantially later (Section III). Finally, general reflections on the naturalness of the whole setting (Section IV) seem to confirm that in the Platonic Phaidon, the already more mature Phaidon, when visited ‘years after’ (Wilamowitz) in Elis by the Pythagorean Echecrates, reports details of the memorable death of his former master.