bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Activity, attitude, music, mindfulness, and brain training
Authors: Budson Andrew E. , Kensinger Elizabeth A.
Published: February 2023

How do you keep your memory strong and your brain healthy? In addition to performing regular aerobic exercise, eating Mediterranean-style meals, limiting alcohol and cannabis, not using illegal drugs, and sleeping well, the activities reviewed in this chapter will help to keep your memory strong. Participate in social activities. Listen to music—but make sure that they are the right tunes for your studying. Likely because it combines exercise, social activities, and music, dancing may be one of the best activities to keep your memory strong. Practice mindfulness. Mindfulness can improve your ability to focus your attention, which, in turn, will help you remember. Keep a positive mental attitude. Engage in novel, cognitively stimulating activities. Enjoy brain-training games, but don’t expect that they will help your memory.
The Culture of War
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: February 2023

Philosophers have struggled with the nature and morality of war. Pacifists will have none of it, usually referring back to the condemnation of hatred and violence in the Sermon on the Mount. Most, however, including Christians, believe that war can sometimes be justified—but only if it is morally constrained. Just War Theory—articulated and developed by Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and others—has wrestled with these problems. Looking at the wars of the last century, regretfully there was not overwhelming use of their ideas—bombing civilians is by any measure wrong—but as the century proceeded one does see increasing effort, as in Desert Storm, to bring warfare into the moral domain.
Grace, Too
Authors: Throop Jason
Published: February 2023

This chapter will explore the contours of Bergson’s early intimations of an “ethics” made visible in his address on Politesse (1885/1892). In an effort to further elucidate what such an ethics might entail, the paper traces how grace and sympathy, two concepts that play a central role in the address, are taken up and rethought in the context of his influential Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (1889). Juxtaposing this early work with his more explicit engagement with morality in his final book—Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1935)—the early roots of Bergson’s call for an open, dynamic, and creative understanding of moral experience are made clear. The paper concludes with some brief reflections on the significance of Bergson’s interventions for the contemporary ethical-turn in the field.
God’s Thoughts
Authors: Lincoln Don
Published: February 2023

Esther Polianowski once had a conversation with Albert Einstein in which he told her what interested him. He wasn’t interested in the details of science; he was interested in the big picture, what he called “God’s thoughts.” He was interested in why the universe was the way it is. To answer that properly requires that scientists identify the building blocks of nature and the law or laws that govern them. This chapter illustrates how very disparate things often have common origins; for instance, the laws of physics explain how the sun burns, galaxies rotate, sodas fizz, and why kittens are fuzzy. While Einstein wasn’t interested in each of those things individually, he was interested in the connections between them.
Dark Matter
Authors: Lincoln Don
Published: February 2023

While Einstein’s theory of general relativity does a good job of describing the motion of many astronomical objects, mysteries remain. Galaxies rotate faster than their visible mass and the laws of physics allow. Clusters of galaxies remain bound together despite moving faster than gravity can contain. The explanation of these mysteries is unknown, with possible solutions ranging from invisible matter, called dark matter, to needing to rewrite the laws of either motion or gravity. This chapter explains the myriad of possible explanations, rules out many, and leaves a few. Given that dark matter is five times more prevalent than ordinary atomic matter, it is imperative that these mysteries be explained.
Music Education Research
Authors: Miksza Peter , Shaw Julia T. , Kapalka Richerme Lauren , Hash Phillip M. , Hodges Donald A.
Published: February 2023

Designed to be used as a primary text in introductory research methods courses, Music Education Research: An Introduction aims to orient even the most novice researchers toward basic concepts and methodologies, offering sustained attention to historical, philosophical, qualitative, quantitative, and action research approaches, including overviews of how to read, interpret, design, and implement research within each framework. Readers will also find information and advice pertaining to approaches for (a) conducting a review of research literature, (b) scholarly writing, and (c) disseminating their research. This book invites readers to consider how conducting research can serve to satisfy their curiosity while also contributing to the collective professional knowledge of the field.
Quantitative Descriptive and Correlational Research
Authors: Miksza Peter , Shaw Julia T. , Kapalka Richerme Lauren , Hash Phillip M. , Hodges Donald A. , Cassidy Parker Elizabeth
Published: February 2023

This chapter presents research designs for descriptive and correlational quantitative research. Descriptive research designs are used to address the question “What is x?” Correlational research designs are used to address the question “How are things related?” In contrast to some experimental research designs, in these design types the primary area of interest under investigation is not manipulated by the researcher. Researchers investigating descriptive or correlational research questions commonly use surveys or observational methods to gather data. Surveys are an efficient method for gathering large amounts of information about such things as individuals’ experiences, beliefs, and attitudes. When designing a survey, researchers must consider many things, such as how long it will be and what it will cover. Observation is an important means of gathering data, as when researchers observe video recordings of teachers or students in various situations. Another approach to observational research is the experience sampling method (ESM). In ESM, participants are interrupted at random times throughout the day and asked to respond to questions concerning their experiences in real time. In other words, researchers ask participants what they are doing at the moment they are contacted.
Personal Renewal
Authors: Wicks Robert J.
Published: February 2023

Stress management basics are covered to prevent or limit impairment of psychological and physical health. One of these basics is to be able to recognize the signs that trigger the need to reach out for support. In addition, to aid in personal renewal, information is provided for designing a realistic but ambitious self-care protocol. This is accomplished by offering questions to unearth one’s present views of the meaning and importance of “self-care” and to offer a broader list of possibilities to consider. In doing this, emphasis is placed on the importance of exercise and exposure to nature as well as those activities which may be considered a luxury but are actually part and parcel of truly healthy self-care.
The Simple Care of a Hopeful Heart
Authors: Wicks Robert J.
Published: February 2023

The “range of resilience” is different for each person based on a unique combination of hereditary, psychological, and sociological factors. However, if we are truly interested in resilience, the goal is to find ways to maximize our own range of resilience and, in so doing, improve our quality of life and the ability to continually renew ourselves. It has been emphasized throughout this book that there are key elements that can help us to maintain resilience: minimizing the effects of stress; cultivating an inner life; and developing new skills and actions that can help us thrive rather than merely survive. In Bounce, these broad areas were addressed by viewing chronic and acute stress; developing a tailored self-care program/protocol; understanding anew the need for a healthy and balanced circle of friends; appreciating and applying wherever possible themes from the literature on posttraumatic growth; embarking on a disciplined self-awareness process that includes discovering and enhancing our own signature strengths; and being aware of the powerful renewing possibilities of solitude, silence, and mindfulness.
How “Alternative Proteins” Create a Private Solution to a Public Problem
Authors: Simon Michele
Published: February 2023

Backed by millions of dollars from donors and investors alike, certain (mostly white male) activists in the vegan movement have pushed aside all other solutions in favor of a marketplace approach that emphasizes the promotion of “alternative proteins.” This rogue wing of “Effective Altruists” has isolated itself from the rest of the food movement by promoting a private capital solution to the myriad problems caused by factory farming, thus moving these problems out of the public policy arena. Effective Altruism’s current focus on markets to save animals is doomed to failure because it does nothing to address the political and economic engine of the meat and dairy industries. Instead of the promotion of “alternative proteins,” a more inclusive approach is needed to create a political movement that brings in a wide range of people and organizations.
The Wisdom Gained from Animals Who Self-Liberate
Authors: McCrystal Rachel
Published: February 2023

In August 2018, at an animal auction house in Hackettstown, New Jersey, over sixty goats, sheep, and piglets escaped through a fence that was pushed open overnight. There was press coverage that told the story of Fred, a goat who escaped from that same auction house the prior year, and who had seemingly returned to liberate others. What followed was a race to save Fred as the auction house owners tried to capture him and shut down the story that was bringing them unwanted attention. Can the value of his life and his liberation be recognized within an Effective Altruist framework? Those who profit off of animal agriculture know the power of individual farmed animals and their acts of rebellion. Does the animal rights movement? Fred’s story illustrates the lengths that we can go to try to save an individual, and why that matters.
Against “Effective Altruism”
Authors: Crary Alice
Published: February 2023

Despite its superficial appeal and the sincerity of its many adherents, Effective Altruism (EA) is a textbook case of moral corruption. It owes its success primarily not to its underlying ethical theory, which is problematic, but to its compatibility with political and economic institutions responsible for some of the very harms it addresses. The criticisms to which EA is subject are much more devastating than its advocates acknowledge. This is clear upon an examination of the institutional critique of EA, which has already received some attention, especially when this is combined with one kind of philosophical critique to which EA is vulnerable, and when these two lines of criticism are combined into a composite critique, which brings the core tenets of EA into question, suggesting it ought to be abandoned as philosophically bankrupt and politically pernicious.
Letters and Conversations
Authors: Li Ji
Published: February 2023

This chapter introduces Caubrière’s private writings and examines his philosophy of personal documentation over the decades. Personal documentation was a technique through which adventurers and missionaries such as Caubrière could develop their interpretations of the world. Their grassroots narratives played a central role in presenting the indigenous society and shaping the popular perception of the empire at home. In an age that celebrated the social sciences, Caubrière’s writing was not only an exercise in everyday martyrdom but also a personal scientific journey undertaken to cope with the profound social and cultural disorder resulting from the encounter of faith and empires.
The Church
Authors: Li Ji
Published: February 2023

This chapter turns to the development of the church system in local Manchurian society and its implications for today’s state-church controversies. The author argues that what the nineteenth-century Catholic missions introduced to Manchuria was not a new, foreign religion but rather the global institution of the Catholic Church, which laid the foundation for local religious governance before the intense state-building of the twentieth century. Besides illustrating the process of institution building and the local church’s indigenization, Caubrière’s detailed grassroots narrative shows how the universal sensibility of pain and suffering served as a vehicle to facilitate Chinese Catholics’ membership in the global Catholic community.
Obligation and Responsibility
Authors: Haji Ishtiyaque
Published: February 2023

This book extends our understanding of the nature of moral obligation and moral responsibility by arguing that they are far more similar in pertinent respects than frequently conceived. First, the view that, unlike obligation, responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise is challenged. Conceptual ties between obligation and responsibility largely speak in favor of responsibility’s requiring alternatives. Second, many philosophers champion responsibility semicompatibilism, the thesis that even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise, it is compatible with responsibility. Essential relations between obligation and responsibility are deployed against this thesis, and the parallel thesis of obligation semicompatibilism is rejected. An upshot of forsaking these species of semicompatibilism is that determinism threatens both obligation and responsibility in virtue of eliminating alternate possibilities. Third, many concur that whereas you may now no longer have an obligation that you previously had, you cannot now fail to be blameworthy for something for which you were formerly to blame. This immutability thesis about blameworthiness is shown to be false, and significant ramifications of its falsity are exposed. Finally, a legitimate difference between obligation and responsibility is uncovered: while how you acquire your values may significantly influence whether you are responsible for much of your conduct, obligation is not “historical” in this way. The impact of these similarities and the one difference on whether obligation is overriding and whether various accounts of practical rationality, love, and punishment are cogent is discussed.
Responsibility Semicompatibilism
Authors: Haji Ishtiyaque
Published: February 2023

Semicompatibilism regarding moral responsibility is the thesis that even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise, it is compatible with responsibility. The overall aim of this chapter is to show that responsibility semicompatibilism is problematic owing to close associations between responsibility and obligation. Two principal reasons are advanced against responsibility semicompatibilism. The first calls into question so-called Frankfurt examples that attempt to show that responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise. These examples fail to give adequate consideration to the bearing of right, wrong, and obligation on responsibility appraisals in situations where agents cannot refrain from doing what they do. The second draws on conceptual connections between, first, blameworthiness and impermissibility and, second, praiseworthiness and permissibility. Since both impermissibility and permissibility presuppose freedom to do otherwise, and it is assumed that determinism precludes such freedom, responsibility semicompatibilism is compromised.
Obligation, Blameworthiness, and Time
Authors: Haji Ishtiyaque
Published: February 2023

Two theses concerning moral obligation enjoy widespread support: First, as of some time, something one has not yet done but will do at a future time can be obligatory for one. Second, obligations can change with the passage of time. For instance, one may now no longer have an obligation that one previously had. The corresponding theses concerning blameworthiness have been largely resisted. Many believe that one cannot now already be blameworthy for a future action of one that one has yet to perform, and that blameworthiness resists change with the passage of time. The chapter argues that these theses about blameworthiness are false and, hence, obligation and blameworthiness are both susceptible to changeability over time. Some important ramifications of this sort of changeability regarding blameworthiness are discussed. Notably, the impact of such changeability for an understanding of forgiveness, and for appropriate reaction to those presumed to be blameworthy, is addressed.
Varieties of Infertility
Authors: Moussa Hadiza , Kang Alice J. , Cooper Barbara M. , Kammerer Natalie
Published: February 2023

Through the life stories of six women, this chapter identifies the different circumstances in which a woman is considered infertile in Niamey, Niger. Some women have had repeated miscarriages or never experienced a pregnancy in their lifetimes and may be experiencing sterility. In other cases, women have had a child, but infant mortality renders them childless and infertile in the eyes of society. In a third set of circumstances, women have given birth and raised a child, but because of their families’ and society’s exhortation to produce many offspring, they are seen as lacking and thus infertile. While their stories are distinct, common themes emerge in interviews with women facing sterility, the loss of children, and subfertility. Women who encounter fertility constraints—whether they have or have not been able to become pregnant—question their own identity and womanhood. Some women without children find fulfillment outside the maternal framework, through fostering, religious devotion, and politics; but these cases are the exception rather than the rule.
Confronting the Biomedical Sphere
Authors: Moussa Hadiza , Kang Alice J. , Cooper Barbara M. , Kammerer Natalie
Published: February 2023

This chapter examines the quality of care for women seeking reproductive health services at health clinics in Niamey, Niger. Whether it is to pursue treatment for infertility, give birth, or obtain contraception, issues ranging from miscommunication to medical violence arise that are rooted in the asymmetrical power relationship between providers and clients. Crucial decisions regarding a woman’s body are often made without her prior consent under the guise of an emergency. Surgical procedures such as tuboplasties and hysterectomies are sometimes carried out without the patient’s agreement or understanding. Despite widespread rumors about their harmful effects, some women go to clinics to obtain contraception. But once there, women are met with long waiting times and inconsiderate staff. Interviewees report being treated rudely by nurses and midwives if they are not their friends or of equal or higher social status. Women say they feel tense, dehumanized, intimidated, and disrespected in their interactions with health professionals. Health clinic staff talk about particular women—notably, those with less formal education and income—as being “bad patients.” While medical facilities ought to provide the best fertility management options for women, systemic problems within those spaces make it hard for women to use them.
Transnational Social Protection
Authors: Levitt Peggy , Sun Ken Chih-Yan , Paul Ruxandra , Dobbs Erica
Published: February 2023

How do individuals protect and provide for themselves in a world where so many people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship? The conventional wisdom is that access to social protections is limited by proximity—by citizenship, by geographic proximity, and by social networks—which all place natural limits on the availability of social protection. The authors believe this conventional wisdom is sorely out of date. How and where people earn their livelihoods, the communities with which they identify, and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled has changed dramatically. Among other topics, the authors examine the relationships between residents without membership and members without residence; professional-class migrants who carry two passports and poor, low-skilled, and undocumented migrants. This book analyzes how these changes are transforming social welfare as we know it. The authors argue that a new set of social welfare arrangements has emerged that they call Hybrid Transnational Social Protection (HTSP). This book finds that HTSP sometimes complements and sometimes substitutes traditional modes of social welfare provision. Migrants and their families unevenly and unequally piece together resource environments across borders from multiple sources. Changing understandings of how and where supranational rights are granted will aid migrants and nonmigrants in their efforts to protect themselves across borders. In fact, the authors suggest four logics upon which rights are based: citizenship, personhood/humanity, the market, and community. The conflicts between these different logics are at the core of the contemporary controversies over what can and should be done to protect dispersed individuals and families from risk, danger, and precarity.
West Germany
Authors: Volpe Tristan A.
Published: February 2023

Chapter 4 examines how West Germany bargained with nuclear latency as the prospect of Bonn building the bomb hung over Washington and Moscow throughout most of the 1960s. West German leaders exploited the fear of proliferation as a diplomatic lever on three successive occasions from 1961 to 1969. West Germany is the only latent nuclear power that challenged two superpowers—an ally and an adversary—at the same time. Scholars have long investigated how the issue of Bonn’s nuclear status lay at the heart of American and Soviet efforts to establish détente in the 1960s. The chapter finds that German leaders were ultimately able to manipulate superpower concerns about proliferation as a diplomatic asset. However, Bonn faced limits on leveraging latency in the shadow of superpower collusion—West German leaders were unable to secure critical concessions despite being in the fissile material sweet spot.
Sibling Intensive Retreats
Authors: Lewis Karen Gail
Published: February 2023

An approach to working with siblings with a totally different tenor is the weekend retreat. The origin of this technique and how and why it works are considered. A detailed description of a sibling intensive retreat with three siblings, including therapists’ comments, illustrates the use of family genograms with color coding to graphically portray family patterns as an aid to both therapist and client comprehension. Included is a discussion of the types of activities, interventions, and exercises used in a retreat based on what is happening between or among the siblings. These techniques help them see and express themselves in nonverbal ways so they become aware of how their frozen images and crystallized roles frame their behaviors with each other and prevent them from seeing each other as they are today.
Serendipity
Authors: Goff James
Published: February 2023

This chapter provides an introduction to the main thread of this book and the journey from an initial invitation to carry out research in northern Chile. The theme of serendipity is explored from this particular invitation through fortuitous searches through old journal volumes in libraries to the development of a series of strands that help the tsunami researcher through to the end point of discovering evidence for past tsunamis. This is a 3.5 billion year journey of discovery from the first known tsunami to more recent events such as the ad 1700 Cascadia tsunami that showed the value of multiple strands drawn from numerous disciplines to complete the picture. The ad 1700 event is part historical and so digging deeper back in time requires even more lateral thinking to produce convincing evidence of ancient tsunamis, which is where this story begins with a challenge to try and unravel the mystery of a ~3800 year old tsunami.
Strand 1
Authors: Goff James
Published: February 2023

This chapter outlines the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and discusses the importance of immediate post-tsunami surveys and tasks involved. It goes through the type of findings made during geological surveys of the event, introducing in particular the first strand in the techniques used to identify tsunami deposits—the characteristics of the sediment it leaves behind. This event and the 2011 Japan tsunami are used to illustrate the vagaries of the deposits that can be found and how geologists go about searching for such evidence. It also outlines the essential personal field equipment used and the difficulties of working in a variety of different field environments using examples from Samoa and New Zealand. It also outlines how the geology helps prove that it was indeed a tsunami that laid down the deposit, although other strands are needed to gain a better understanding, thus introducing the next strand—oral traditions.
Strand 2
Authors: Goff James
Published: February 2023

This chapter considers various oral traditions, which are invaluable not only for guiding geologists to suitable locations but also in supporting evidence found there. Despite this, many scientists treat oral traditions with skepticism. Using examples from New Zealand, Vanuatu, and Wallis and Futuna, the chapter makes the case for using both the geological and oral tradition strands together to get a better understanding of past tsunamis, not just those generated by tsunamis but from other sources too. Oral traditions cover a multitude of scenarios, perhaps related to the source but invariably dealing with the catastrophic after-effects of such devastating events that came from the sea. It also shows that there are other lines of evidence that can add even more to the picture.
Historical Memory and Antisemitism in Post-Communist East Central Europe
Authors: Subotic Jelena
Published: February 2023

This essay surveys the current manifestations of antisemitism in post-Communist East Central Europe by linking antisemitism to historical memory, especially the still contested memory of the Holocaust. The objective of the article is to analyze the changing forms of antisemitism in East Central Europe since the collapse of Communism and to explain its relationship to unresolved questions of historical memory, especially the memory of what was once a vibrant Jewish presence and is now an overwhelming Jewish absence. The essay first provides a framework for understanding the political context of contemporary antisemitism. Next, it links the problem of antisemitism to the contested issues of historical memory in East Central Europe. It then offers a few brief snapshots of contemporary historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust and the place of the Jews in the region, as well as examples of contemporary antisemitism.
Representation
Authors: Dillon Elizabeth Maddock
Published: February 2023

Democracy is a form of government by the people, but in order to govern, the ideas and wishes of the people themselves must be represented. How this representation takes place is no simple matter. This essay explores the competing and divergent modes of representation through which the people appear—not only through the ballot box but also through modes of writing (the print public sphere) and performance (the performative commons), whether at the theater or in the streets. In particular, the essay explores the “people out of doors” and their modes of embodiment, as well as the relation between literacy and the enforced a-literacy of disfranchised (non)members of the people, including African Americans and Native Americans.
Women’s Suffrage
Authors: Gold David
Published: February 2023

This essay examines key arguments made for and against women’s suffrage that evidence conceptualizations of citizenship rights in the period, illuminating divides that still challenge contemporary feminism. For many white women, citizenship was tied to racial identity, influencing their opposition to suffrage, and even white suffrage advocates were at times unable to offer full support for universal suffrage that included women of color, fracturing potential cross-racial alliances. For many Black women, meanwhile, women’s suffrage was inseparable from racial justice. Women’s suffrage thus has not been stable or meant the same thing to all constituencies. Examining sources such as the 1869 American Equal Rights Association meeting proceedings, the 1915 “Votes for Women” symposium published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Crisis, and the 1916 Anti-Suffrage Essays by Massachusetts Women, this chapter suggests ways in which ideologies of race, gender, and citizenship interacted in the women’s rights movement in the long nineteenth century.
Belief
Authors: Castiglia Christopher
Published: February 2023

Intangible, ideal, and imminent, the principles of democracy are objects of belief. Because of that, democracy cannot exist without belief. While that belief might be the cause of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” this chapter argues that belief in belief is a self-perpetuating source of resilience and aspiration among citizens of a democracy; as the political theorist William Connolly writes, “a positive existential spirituality” enables “a positive attachment to the world.” This essay centers on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century spiritualism and the philosophy of John Dewey to explore the relationship between belief, attachment, and conscientious democratic reform. It argues that the phenomenology of belief is—or should be—at the center of the spirit of democracy, the “democracy-to-come.”
Public Opinion
Authors: Schmeller Mark
Published: February 2023

“Public opinion” entered the American political lexicon during the age of revolutions, but it was not necessarily a revolutionary concept. While some Americans identified public opinion with democracy, the concept could just as easily be used to limit self-government, cement traditional prejudices and hierarchies, forestall deliberation, and marginalize dissent. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, Americans deployed the concept of public opinion in three broadly defined but distinct ways that variously rejected, redeemed, or attempted to reassemble enduring democratic sensibilities. Politicians were the first to invoke public opinion, using the concept to define and legitimate political parties. Reformers came next to enlist public opinion in sundry projects of moral agitation and social transformation. Last came the social scientists, who redefined public opinion as a psychosocial phenomenon generated by mass communication and propaganda.
Partisan
Authors: Funchion John
Published: February 2023

In the eighteenth century, the term “partisan” came to describe the individual who engaged in insurgent warfare. Its use inaugurated a discourse on the politically disruptive features of this subject, which circulates off as well as on the battlefield. In US literature, the partisan is closely associated with a hypermasculine white man whose allegiances remain intensely local and whose power resides with the bullet, not the ballot. Federalists saw partisans in combat or in the halls of government as fanatics who cast their political opponents as enemies. At the end of the nineteenth century, Black writers established how partisans formed paramilitary groups and passed draconian election laws after Reconstruction’s dismantlement to suppress Black voters. Although often romanticized in historical novels and Hollywood movies as the freedom fighter, the partisan is an illiberal subject who poses a threat to democracy.
Disgust
Authors: Frank Jason
Published: February 2023

Conservatives in the 1790s responded with disgust to the egalitarian pressures democracy placed on the hierarchies of the existing social and political order. Disgust, like contempt, plays an important role in securing and maintaining status and class distinctions. But where contempt remains removed and detached, even coolly indifferent, disgust mingles with threat and surprise and cannot tolerate or remain in the proximity of its object. Focusing on the writings of the radical social conservative William Cobbett, this essay demonstrates how his frequent association of democracy with disgust vividly illuminates the egalitarian challenge democracy posed to defenders of the inherited order during this period of revolutionary transition. Cobbett’s rhetoric recalls the radicalism of democracy’s basic claims. In contrast to normative arguments against disgust in contemporary democratic theory, the historical entanglement of democracy and disgust suggests the relationship might be constitutive and irresolvable.
Moderation
Authors: Carr Jean Ferguson
Published: February 2023

The injunction to learn to be “moderate”—to avoid extremes, to contain passions and resentments—is a key discourse and practice in nineteenth-century instructional books. This term prefigures some of the contemporary unease about activists, and about those who seem to be going too far left or right on the political scale. As in today’s discourse, where the notion of what counts as the middle keeps shifting, so in the nineteenth century the notion of what would be moderate was a highly gendered, raced, and classed performance. Moderation was seen as a frame for civic discussion, a hedge against aristocratic license, and a practice linked to the temperance movement. It was a self-monitoring practice that disciplined the emotions, that contained anger or grief, and that crafted “appropriate” responses.
Disfranchisement
Authors: Chakkalakal Tess
Published: February 2023

This chapter provides a short history of denying African American men the right to vote in the United States since its founding, which is otherwise known as disfranchisement. Taking up works by Walt Whitman, Booker T. Washington, and Charles W. Chesnutt, and the role they played in arguments both for and against voting rights, alongside close readings of legal documents such as the Reconstruction Amendments, anti-disfranchisement cases such as Giles v. Harris (1903), and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the chapter uncovers the role African Americans played in the development of voting rights in the theory and practice of American democracy.
Mirroring and Understanding
Authors: Rizzolatti Giacomo , Sinigaglia Corrado
Published: February 2023

This chapter provides a review of the data collected over the last twenty years in support of the claim that the mirror mechanism can play a distinctive role in our understanding of other people’s actions, emotions, and vitality forms. This claim is undoubtedly the most debated of all the issues tackled in the book. For this reason, the chapter extensively discusses the main lines of evidence suggesting that the sensorimotor transformations induced by the mirror responses impact on how observed actions are perceptually judged. Similarly, it examines several studies, assessing whether and to what extent the recruitment of visceromotor representations plays a distinctive role in understanding other peoples’ emotions. The chapter closes with a review of the evidence of mirror responses for vitality form recognition.
Understanding from the Inside
Authors: Rizzolatti Giacomo , Sinigaglia Corrado
Published: February 2023

This final chapter is dedicated to clarifying what kind of action, emotion, and vitality form understanding, if any, can be related to the mirror responses and their corresponding sensori- and visceromotor transformations. One way of doing this makes use of the distinction between basic and full-blown understanding: while there is a large amount of evidence indicating that the mirror responses are sufficient for a basic understanding of the actions, emotions, and vitality forms of other individuals, exerting at the same time a content-respecting influence on the observer’s capability of judging them, whether and to what extent the mirror responses might contribute to full-blown mindreading is still an open issue, or so the authors argue. Making this distinction allows them to reply to the main objections formulated against their claim as well as to introduce and discuss the notion of understanding from the inside which evolved from a brilliant intuition of Marc Jeannerod. This notion implicates, among other things, that the experiences we acquire while observing other people’s actions and emotions are in certain respects similar to our own experiences when executing those actions or living those emotions ourselves.
Introduction
Authors: Marten James
Published: February 2023

This chapter provides an overview of youth culture, which represents multiple communities and values. It begins by considering the difference on how historians and social scientists examine youth culture. While social scientists are consciously trying to find solutions to perceived problems, historians are more interested in explaining why particular aspects of youth culture are perceived as problems. The chapter then explores how histories of youth culture can be divided into several categories of inquiry: juvenile delinquency, child labor, child soldiers, youth activism, girlhood, and popular culture. It also outlines the subsequent chapters, which, taken together, demonstrate that youth culture has developed out of efforts by adults to shape coming of age and the efforts of youth themselves to find their own paths. Throughout, the authors distinguish between the histories of youth and the histories of youth culture.
Privatized Higher Education in Thailand
Authors: Kanwar Prachayani Praphamontripong , Lo Florence
Published: February 2023

Over the last few decades, the Thai government has been pushing for privatization of public higher education institutions along with promotion of private higher education sector. This has significantly increased student enrollment and expanded the country’s higher education system but Thailand has started facing major challenges including a declining population, stagnating enrollment, and slow economic growth. Most higher education institutions are struggling with academic quality and profitability and hardly claim international academic recognition. This chapter approaches the private–public dynamics of Thai higher education and analyzes the ongoing issues of access, quality control, and finance in relation to the government’s policy initiatives on privatization.
The Neuroarchaeology of Language Origins
Authors: Putt Shelby S. J.
Published: February 2023

Working within a neuroarchaeological framework, this chapter discusses the results of multiple studies that demonstrate that linguistic instruction is not necessary to learn how to make complex Acheulian handaxes, and furthermore, there is limited involvement of established language structures of the brain during Acheulian tool-making. The transition from Oldowan to Acheulian technology may be more informative about the origins of music than the origins of language. Acheulian tool-making utilizes a vast working memory network in the brain, which perhaps uncoincidentally is also activated when pianists play the piano. This research suggests that selective pressures to exploit novel food resources with advanced tools may have resultantly selected for enhancements in working memory, including a working memory system dedicated to the processing of verbal information. Overall, what can be gleaned from these studies is that the Acheulian transition was probably not because of a punctuated language evolutionary event but rather may be evidence of advancements in working memory capabilities over time. Language subsequently evolved in a mosaic fashion over a longer period of time, which could explain the lengthy tenure of the Acheulian industry as evidenced in the archaeological record.
Where Are the Children?
Authors: de Beaune Sophie A.
Published: February 2023

From the principle that children must have formed a significant percentage of the population in the Palaeolithic societies, it can be deduced that a large part of the archaeological remains should concern them. However, few prehistorians were interested in them, perhaps because they considered that their presence was not perceptible, except in a funerary context, or, quite simply, because their contribution to the life of the group was negligible. The author offers here a review of archaeological evidence attesting to the presence of children in the decorated caves and settlements. Taken together, these clues give an idea of the place of children in the hunter-gatherer societies of the Upper European Palaeolithic and their activities—learning how to knap flint, possibly participating in the decoration of caves, games, and toys—as well as the treatment they received in death.
Increasing Cohabitation and Decreasing Marriage: Explanations
Authors: Sánchez Gassen Nora E.
Published: February 2023

In most cultures and religions, marriage has long been one of the fundamental building blocks of adult life, offering social recognition, legal stability and financial benefits to spouses and their children. Cohabitation, on the other hand, has traditionally been viewed as the less desirable form of union. It used to be socially stigmatized or even legally prohibited in many countries. Even today, cohabitation generally does not entail the same legal rights and obligations as marriage and is still frowned upon or even illegal in some countries. Nonetheless, during the most recent decades, cohabitation has started to spread in large parts of the world. This chapter reviews some of the reasons behind the surge in popularity of this union type, focusing on macro-, meso-, and micro-level explanations.
Human Intersexual Courtship
Authors: Caton Neil R. , Lewis David M. G. , Al-Shawaf Laith , Evans Kortnee C.
Published: February 2023

From cockroaches and cuttlefish to crocodiles and chimpanzees, organisms across diverse taxa are equipped with physical and psychological systems for courting opposite-sex conspecifics. In this chapter, we focus on the colorful—literally and figuratively—collection of courtship ornaments, tactics, and strategies of one primate species: Homo sapiens. Humans use their vocal qualities—deep voices, soft voices, expressive voices—to show their dominance, kindness, and intelligence. They dance dynamically, kiss passionately, and offer caring (as well as deceptive) compliments. Humans’ courtship signals and the psychophysical systems that detect them span the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory. We review research across these perceptual modalities and offer suggestions for future work into the many uncharted areas of this fascinating domain.
Initiation of Non-Heterosexual Relationships
Authors: Varella Valentova Jaroslava , Amaral Bruno Henrique , Varella Marco Antonio Correa
Published: February 2023

Human sexual orientation is an intriguing phenomenon, still poorly understood but with important evolutionary implications. Evolutionary-based studies mostly focus on heterosexual individuals and relationships, probably because non-heterosexuality concerns a minority of the population and decreases individual direct reproductive success. To better understand human nature, it is important to analyze whether the mating psychology of minorities exhibit specific evolved sexual/reproductive strategies. Here we review studies on partner preferences, mate choice, and flirting in non-heterosexual populations, to identify which patterns are similar to or different from heterosexuals. The general pattern supports the notion that sex differences are larger than within sex variation among people of different sexual orientations. However, although some mating strategies among non-heterosexuals resemble heterosexuals of the same sex, others resemble heterosexuals of the opposite sex, and yet in others, the pattern is different than among either heterosexual men or women. We point to limitations of the current state of this research, and we suggest possible future directions in the study of non-heterosexual relationship initiation.
Borges, Anthologizer of the Fantastic
Authors: Esplin Emron
Published: February 2023

Jorge Luis Borges was the great disseminator of the fantastic in the twentieth century. He wrote and cowrote several fantastic stories, but his most profound effect on the spread of fantastic literature emerged from his work as an anthologizer and editor. Borges co-created various anthologies of fantastic literature throughout his career, directed a literary magazine that published works of fantastic literature, and served as the literary voice behind two multivolume libraries or book series that included works of the fantastic. This chapter approaches Borges the anthologizer as a “rewriter” of the fantastic; examines the power of the anthologization process; details the difficulties of defining what Borges meant by the term “fantastic”; and explores the multiple and collaborative anthological projects that Borges propagated throughout his career to show how Borges challenged realist literary traditions and elevated the reputation of the fantastic literature that he and his colleagues specifically read for pleasure.
Self-Determination Theory as the Science of Eudaimonia and Good Living
Authors: Martela Frank
Published: February 2023

What makes life good, and what should we ultimately strive for in order to have a valuable and flourishing existence? One of the key appeals of self-determination theory (SDT) is that it provides an empirical research program that can illuminate many of the fundamental issues revolving around the question of good living. Within SDT, eudaimonia is seen as a way of living characterized by intrinsic goals, autonomous motivation, and psychological need satisfaction that are all conducive to produce subjective well-being. This chapter reviews how SDT defines eudaimonia, the role of psychological needs in eudaimonia, and what empirical research tells us about more eudaimonic motives and activities for human beings. It concludes by discussing prosocial motivation and the crucial role of social contexts in nurturing or thwarting basic psychological needs, thus significantly affecting whether the brighter or darker side of human nature becomes prominent, and whether the person is able to flourish.
Conditional Regard in Development and Relationships
Authors: Kanat-Maymon Yaniv , Assor Avi , Roth Guy
Published: February 2023

This chapter focuses on conditional regard as an influence practice in parenting, at school, and among romantic partners. It distinguishes between conditional negative regard (CNR), giving less affection and esteem when others do not comply with one’s expectations, and conditional positive regard (CPR), giving more affection and esteem when others comply. As CPR involves positive emotional reinforcement, behaviorally oriented theorists may view it as a benign and useful practice. However, research shows that CPR, and not only CNR, leads to serious performance, emotional, and relational costs. These negative effects occur because these practices provide a diluted and provisional experience of relatedness satisfaction at the cost of significant autonomy frustration. These need experiences then lead to stressful and resentful internalization, which underlies most of the negative effects of conditional regard. Additionally, the chapter discusses potential antecedents and moderators of conditional regard along with conceptual clarifications and challenges as a basis for future research.