V. J. Thomas

Research increasingly highlights the importance of social disconnectedness for the development of psychosis. However, the perspective of individuals with psychosis remains largely underexplored. At present, there is also no comprehensive view of the role of social processes throughout different phases of psychosis development. The current study aims to investigate 1) how individuals with a psychotic disorder experience social disconnection and 2) the role of social disconnection We conducted two focus groups, with individuals diagnosed with a psychotic disorder (N = 8). The data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. We structured the data according to three phases: pre-psychotic early life, development of psychotic symptoms and recovery. The first phase included following themes: “developing distrustful views of others through childhood interpersonal adversity” and “growing up socially isolated”. The second phase had three themes: “increasing separation between common and individual reality perception”, “struggling to share psychotic experiences due to stigma” and “losing relationships due to feeling misunderstood and decreased social functioning”. The final phase encompassed: “accepting psychosis diagnosis through social support”, “grounding influence of others” and “finding purpose through social integration”. In general, individuals with psychosis viewed social disconnectedness as a highly important factor for understanding and treating psychosis.

Wild rice has always been essential to life in the Upper Midwest and neighboring Canada. In this far-reaching book, Thomas Vennum, Jr., uses travelers' narratives, historical and ethnological accounts, scientific data, historical and contemporary photographs and sketches, his own field work, and the words of Indian people to examine the importance of this wild food to the Ojibway people. He details the technology of harvesting and processing, from seventeenth-century reports though modern mechanization. He explains the important place of wild rice in Ojibway ceremony and legend and depicts the rich social life of the traditional rice camps. And he reviews the volatile issues of treaty rights and litigations involving Indian problems in maintaining this traditional resource. A staple of the Ojibway diet and economy for centuries, wild rice has now become a gourmet food. With twentieth-century agricultural technology and paddy cultivation, white growers have virtually removed this important source of income from Indain hands. Nevertheless, the Ojibway continue to harvest and process rice each year. It remains a vital part of their social, cultural, and religious life.

As one approach to examining the way ethical decisions are made, we asked experts and novices to review a set of scenarios that depict some important ethical tensions in research. The method employed was “protocol analysis,” a talk-aloud technique pioneered by cognitive scientists for the analysis of expert performance. The participants were asked to verbalize their normally unexpressed thought processes as they responded to the scenarios, and to make recommendations for courses of action. We found that experts spent more time working through the decision-making process than novices and also raised substantially more concerns than novices. Differences also exist among the three groups of experts

In his violent charge against the French Revolution, Edmund Burke elevated the political debate to a philosophical level. His deepest argument consisted in reproaching revolutionaries for sinning by apriorism, seeking to deduce, like geometricians, a new constitution from the abstract principles set out in the Declaration of Human Rights. Taken up by the German disciples of Burke, this criticism of the method adopted by the Constituent Assembly drew from the empiricist postulates of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment all the conservative implications already concealed in Hume’s political and historical texts. Yet, it is from the outset on this speculative ground that the defence of the right of revolution is played out in Fichte. Reproaching empiricism for reducing the mind to the “blind mechanism of the association of ideas”, passively determined by an exteriority in itself, Fichte intends, on the contrary, to base the experience itself on the activity of an absolutely independent “I-in-itself”. Conceived as a free causality, thus being able to free oneself from Humian “customary conjunctions” in order to begin a new series in the order of phenomena, man, for Fichte, not only has the “faculty of self-improvement”, but the very law of his freedom even makes it his duty. With regard to this categorical imperative of self-improvement, there is no Common Law, nor Ancient Constitution, nor “inheritance from our forefathers” that can stand. Hence, Fichte does not shrink from revolution if these venerable institutions of the past are an obstacle to man’s destiny.

We understand the workings of the human body as a series of interdependent physiological relationships: muscle interacts with bone as the heart responds to hormones secreted by the brain, all the way down to the inner workings of every cell. To make an organism function, no one component can work alone. In light of this, why is it that the accepted understanding that the physical phenomenon of the mind is attributed only to the brain? In The Embodied Mind, internationally renowned psychiatrist Dr. Thomas R. Verny sets out to redefine our concept of the mind and consciousness. He brilliantly compiles new research that points to the mind's ties to every part of the body. The Embodied Mind collects disparate findings in physiology, genetics, and quantum physics in order to illustrate the mounting evidence that somatic cells, not just neural cells, store memory, inform genetic coding, and adapt to environmental changes-all behaviors that contribute to the mind and consciousness. Cellular memory, Verny shows, is not just an abstraction, but a well-documented scientific fact that will shift our understanding of memory. Verny describes single-celled organisms with no brains demonstrating memory, and points to the remarkable case of a French man who, despite having a brain just a fraction of the typical size, leads a normal life with a family and a job. The Embodied Mind shows how intelligence and consciousness-traits traditionally attributed to the brain alone-also permeate our entire being. Bodily cells and tissues use the same molecular mechanisms for memory as our brain, making our mind more fluid and adaptable than we could have ever imaged.

In the female reproductive tract, mammalian sperm undergo a regulated sequence of prefusion changes that "prime" sperm for fertilization. Among the least understood of these complex processes are the molecular mechanisms that underlie sperm guidance by environmental chemical cues. A "hard-wired" Ca2+ signaling strategy that orchestrates specific motility patterns according to given functional requirements is an emerging concept for regulation of sperm swimming behavior. The molecular players involved, the spatiotemporal characteristics of such motility-associated Ca2+ dynamics, and the relation between a distinct Ca2+ signaling pattern and a behavioral sperm phenotype, however, remain largely unclear. Here, we report the functional characterization of two human sperm chemoreceptors. Using complementary molecular, physiological, and behavioral approaches, we comparatively describe sperm Ca2+ responses to specific agonists of these novel receptors and bourgeonal, a known sperm chemoattractant. We further show that individual receptor activation induces specific Ca2+ signaling patterns with unique spatiotemporal dynamics. These distinct Ca2+ dynamics are correlated to a set of stimulus-specific stereotyped behavioral responses that could play vital roles during various stages of prefusion sperm-egg chemical communication. © 2011 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.

Increasingly, international governmental networks and organisations make it necessary to master the legal principles of other jurisdictions. Since the advent of international criminal tribunals this need has fully reached criminal law. A large part of their work is based on comparative research. The legal systems which contribute most to this systemic discussion are common law and civil law, sometimes called continental law. So far this dialogue appears to have been dominated by the former. While there are many reasons for this, one stands out very clearly: Language. English has become the lingua franca of international legal research. The present book addresses this issue. Thomas Vormbaum is one of the foremost German legal historians and the book's original has become a cornerstone of research into the history of German criminal law beyond doctrinal expositions; it allows a look at the system's genesis, its ideological, political and cultural roots. In the field of comparative research, it is of the utmost importance to have an understanding of the law's provenance, in other words its historical DNA.

La kairologie, telle que la cerne Thomas Vercruysse, est une attitude de pensée qui privilégie la circonstance plutôt que l'essence, la métamorphose plutôt que la substance. Ce livre montre comment la saisie de la circonstance et de ses chances réclame la labilité de la métamorphose : saisir l'occasion, profiter des circonstances, c'est ne pas rater une seule occasion de se métamorphoser, de suivre l'air du temps que l'on respire, qui nous modifie et que l'on modifie. La kairologie pourrait bien servir la cause des sciences humaines dans la mesure même où elle permet de repenser la cause dans les sciences humaines. Penser en termes de kairos, c'est refuser le déterminisme causal, peu susceptible d'éclairer les phénomènes humains et biologiques - leur créativité, leur imprévisibilité, leur inventivité."--Page 4 of cover.

In this book, a professor of literature and a physicist offer a broad, new, interdisciplinary account of Modernism. Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook encompass physics, the visual arts and literature in a thought-provoking analysis of the period from the 1880s to World War II. Uncovering common structures and values underlying each of these disparate fields, the authors define Modernism and its historical location between nineteenth-century intellectual conventions that preceded it and the Postmodernism that followed. Bridging boundaries that traditionally divide disciplines, Vargish and Mook create a uniquely coherent and comprehensive view of the aesthetics and intellectual values that characterize the culture of Modernism.

It is too early to know if the judicial appointments of President Donald J. Trump will be an enduring legacy of his presidency because the Biden-Harris administration may have several opportunities to roll back his achievements. Still, Trump’s election in 2016 stymied the Left’s hope of a progressive Supreme Court. Trump has remodeled the Supreme Court into an originalist court. His Supreme Court appointments – Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett – have defended religious liberty claims repeatedly. Thus, if the Democrats are not able to pack the Court, Trump’s one-term presidency may have produced the most important cohort of judges in a generation.

PurposeThe COVID-19 lockdown interrupted normal daily activities, which may have led to an increase in sedentary behavior. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the level of physical activity among Swiss office workers.MethodsOffice workers from two Swiss organizations, aged 18–65 years, were included. Baseline data from January 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic became effective in Switzerland were compared with follow-up data during the lockdown phase in April 2020. Levels of physical activity were assessed using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Paired sample t-tests or Wilcoxon signed-rank test were performed for statistical analysis.ResultsData from 76 participants were analyzed. Fifty-four participants were female. The mean age was 42.7 years at baseline. About 75% of the participants met the recommendations on minimal physical activity, both before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the lockdown. Weak statistical evidence for a decline in total physical activity in metabolic equivalent of task minutes per week was found, with no evidence for a decrease in the three types of activity: walking, moderate-intensity activity and vigorous-intensity activity. Across the three categories “high,” “moderate,” and “low” physical activity, 17% of the participants became less active during the lockdown while 29% became more active.ConclusionThe COVID-19 pandemic did not result in a reduction in total physical activity levels among a sample of Swiss office workers during the first weeks of lockdown. Improved work-life balance and working times may have contributed to this finding.Clinical Trial Registrationwww.ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04169646. Registered 15 November 2019 – Retrospectively registered, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04169646.

ObjectiveThe COVID-19 pandemic and government measures implemented to counter the spread of the infection may be a major stressor affecting the psychological health of university students. This study aimed to explore how anxiety symptoms changed during the pandemic.Methods676 students at Zurich University of Applied Sciences participated in the first and second survey waves. Anxiety symptoms were assessed using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-Scale-7. Risk and protective factors were examined.ResultsGAD-7 scores decreased significantly from T0 to T1. Participants with moderate-to-severe anxiety score were 20.2 and 15.6% at T0 and T1, respectively. The following positively predicted anxiety: older age, female gender, non-Swiss nationality, loneliness, participants’ concern about their own health, and interaction between time and participants’ concern about their own health. Resilience and social support negatively predicted anxiety.ConclusionsOur findings provide information for public health measures and psychological interventions supporting the mental health of university students during the COVID-19 emergency.

Over the past decades, we have witnessed calls for greater transdisciplinary engagement between scientific and societal actors to develop more robust answers to complex societal challenges. Although there seems to be agreement that these approaches might nurture innovations of a new kind, we know little regarding the research practices, their potential, and the limitations. To fill this gap, this article investigates a funding scheme in the area of transdisciplinary sustainability research. It offers a detailed analysis of the imaginaries and expectations on which the funding scheme rests and how researchers actually practice transdisciplinarity within the respective projects. Identifying three ideal typical models of science–society relations at work, attention is paid to how, where, and when societal and scientific arenas get entangled. This article discusses the tensions between classical academic values and efforts to open research to society, the prevailing power structures that make societal participation challenging, the importance of place and technopolitical cultures, and how temporal project structures impede more radical openings to new ways of knowledge production. We finally emphasize that transdisciplinary knowledge production can only become a serious option for addressing societal challenges if broader changes are made to the knowledge regimes in place.

Steven D. Smith persuasively shows that paganism and Christianity are in a culture war that spans two thousand years. Throughout his book, he shows that Christianity is the exceptional religion in three ways. First, Christianity is more authentically open to philosophy than paganism. Second, Christianity does not sacralize the State. Third, Christianity provides a more fulfilling understanding of sexual ethics. Despite the exceptionalism of Christianity, it is currently facing a significant challenge from a renewed and secularized paganism. This secularized paganism is attractive due to the fallibility of human nature. However, Christianity’s theology and intellectual tradition provide meaningful answers and rebuttals to paganism’s more sensual claims.

Our study explores the relationships between psychological and driving-related personality traits, fluid intelligence and cognitive abilities for drivers whose driving licence has been revoked due to intoxicated driving (alcohol and/or drugs). We were able to show that highly significant impacts on cognitive functions derive from the participants’ age and fluid intelligence. In addition, driving-related personality traits such as emotional instability, a sense of responsibility and self-control contributed significantly to some of the cognitive abilities that are important for fitness to drive. Additionally, the mediating effects of fluid intelligence in the model are discussed. Traffic psychologists can use this knowledge in their assessment of drivers, mainly regarding the possible compensation of cognitive deficits regarding the fitness to drive.