Search Results (37)

This study discusses subjective aspects of the commodification of healthcare from an ethno-class perspective using narrative analysis of patient stories. We hypothesize that the objective social hierarchy of resources, together with a certain degree of individual agency, structure the patients’ strategies of coping with the public–private “maze” of the healthcare system. The findings show different coping strategies indicating three different ethno-class ‘patient-selves’: The dominant ‘Neo-Liberal Self’, prevalent among the upper middle-class (mostly Ashkenazi Jews) that expresses contempt of the public system, and an individual hero-quest story maneuvering between the private and the public. The ‘troubled’ patient-self of the low-middle and working classes (mainly Mizrahi Jews and Arabs) also expresses negative impressions of the public system, but it is drawn to sadness, fear of being lost, and a longing for a lost ‘logic of care’. Finally, a ‘communal alternative self’ among the Arab lower classes seeks personal solutions through social networks that include local health providers while crossing barriers between private and public sectors. All selves show some degree of neoliberal values, but the first ‘patient-self’ implies a sense of social mastery while the other two attest to the agency and even resistance of patients facing structural barriers and scarce resources. Full article

Automated vehicles controlled by artificial intelligence are becoming capable of making moral decisions independently. This study investigates the differences in participants’ perceptions of the moral decision-maker’s permissibility when viewing scenarios (pre-test) and after witnessing the outcomes of moral decisions (post-test). It also investigates how permissibility, ten typical moral emotions, and perceived moral agency fluctuate when AI and the human driver make deontological or utilitarian decisions in a pedestrian-sacrificing dilemma (Experiment 1, N = 254) and a driver-sacrificing dilemma (Experiment 2, N = 269) from a third-person perspective. Moreover, by conducting binary logistic regression, this study examined whether these factors could predict the non-decrease in permissibility ratings. In both experiments, participants preferred to delegate decisions to human drivers rather than to AI, and they generally preferred utilitarianism over deontology. The results of perceived moral emotions and moral agency provide evidence. Moreover, Experiment 2 elicited greater variations in permissibility, moral emotions, and perceived moral agency compared to Experiment 1. Moreover, deontology and gratitude could positively predict the non-decrease in permissibility ratings in Experiment 1, while contempt had a negative influence. In Experiment 2, the human driver and disgust were significant negative predictor factors, while perceived moral agency had a positive influence. These findings deepen the comprehension of the dynamic processes of autonomous driving’s moral decision-making and facilitate understanding of people’s attitudes toward moral machines and their underlying reasons, providing a reference for developing more sophisticated moral machines. Full article

Born the seventh son of a Louisiana preacher in 1942 and becoming the co-founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, Huey P. Newton evidenced a complex, changing, and contradictory synthesis of faith and facts until his death in 1989. Focusing on 1960s’ U.S. Black Nationalism as materialist, Maoist, and Marxist in its appeals to objectivity, rationality, and positivist science, some scholars have presented Black Nationalist contempt for religion as pacifying and counter-revolutionary. Conversely, others have focused on the religious-like nature of formally secular 1960s’ Black Nationalism, even framing it as a “form of piety” and a “politics of transcendence”. Between these bookends, the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton have simultaneously been characterized as both “anti-religious” and as possessing an “innate spirituality”. I attempt to reconcile these divergent interpretations through an analysis of Newton’s worldviews (culled from his graduate school papers, published articles and books, and speeches and interviews). Newton frequently described aspects of the human condition as partially spiritual and in so doing, regularly married dialectical materialist variants of anti-capitalism, Black Nationalism, and ethno-racial self-determinism with “mystical” and theological aesthetics, concepts, stories, and styles from a variety of religious and philosophic traditions. These “paradoxical pieties” included, but were not limited to, the embrace and critique of spiritual existentialism and transcendentalism; deism and theosis; Christian hermeneutics; Zen Buddhism; and Vedic and Pranic Hinduism. Full article

The prevalence of infidelity is high, although it can have destructive impacts on marital relationships. Most past research has focused on utilitarian concerns against extramarital behavior, analyzing the motivational forces that either deter or foster infidelity as a function of the rewards and costs that unfaithful behavior would involve for the individual. The present research (total N = 1067 Romanian married participants) aimed to highlight the intrinsic moral concerns that deter infidelity in marital relationships by applying the general framework of the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). The first study developed a measure of the moral reasons for fidelity and examined its dimensions and psychometric properties. The second study investigated its factorial validity and its relationships with the actual tendency to engage in unfaithful behaviors, the intensity of moral emotions toward infidelity, and the use of different emotion regulation strategies. Overall, the results suggest four types of moral reasons for fidelity: heeding rules, reciprocal ownership, loyalty, and decency and nonmaleficence, and the new scale emerged as having satisfactory psychometric proprieties. Higher scores were positively associated with moral disgust, anger, and contempt toward unfaithful marital partners and compassion toward their spouses, as well as cognitive reappraisal and endorsement of the five moral domains described by MFT. Also, married individuals scoring higher on this measure were also found to have a lower propensity toward infidelity. These findings pinpoint a fine-grained outline of the moral underpinnings of fidelity and indicate their potential relevance for the actual tendency to engage in extramarital relations. Full article

Gender-based violence among young people is a pressing global problem, causing injury and disability to women and posing physical, mental, sexual, and reproductive health risks. This study aimed to psychometrically validate the Dating Violence Questionnaire—Revised (DVQ-R) in a sample of 340 Ecuadorian university students. The study included 340 male and female students from two universities in Ecuador. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire were rigorously assessed by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which revealed a four-factor model as the most parsimonious solution (RMSEA = 0.012). The factors were labelled as follows: ‘emotional neglect and contempt’, ‘physical violence and aggression’, ‘coercion and control’, and ‘emotional manipulation and testing’. The validated scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha (α) of 0.839, with individual alpha values of 0.872, 0.764, 0.849, and 0.729 for each dimension. Convergent validity was established, as the mean variance extracted per factor exceeded 0.4. Divergent validity was confirmed, as the variance retained by each factor was greater than the variance shared between them (mean variance extracted per factor > ϕ²). These results indicate that the DVQ-R is a valid and reliable instrument to assess dating violence among Spanish-speaking young adults, which supports future research and prevention programmes. Full article

This paper takes a political sociological look at the knee-taking in football (or soccer) inspired by the Black Lives Matter campaign. Based upon a study of the new elites, it explores the essence of this performative act and situates it within the ‘obsession’ with racism and anti-racism. Based less on the reality of the problem of racism than upon the emerging values of this new ‘class’, the celebration and promotion of taking the knee is understood as a new type of political etiquette that combines a sense of shame-awareness with a certain contempt for the ‘masses’ who attend football matches. The confusion about whether the support for Black Lives Matter was political or not is discussed with reference to the idea of the changed and to some extent incoherent nature of the modern elites whose values, it is suggested, are more a form of anti-matter than a clear projection of ideas and beliefs. As a result, the quasi-religious nature of the sentiment expressed in modern anti-racism and the action of taking the knee are considered in relation to the ideas of ‘raising awareness’ and of ‘educating yourself’, both of which have an implicitly elitist quality but also lack precision or clarity about either the problem being addressed or any solution to it. Often more therapeutic than overtly political, elite anti-racism is almost by necessity performative, but also comes with a disciplinary dimension for those who refuse to ‘take the knee’ to it. Ultimately, it is suggested that the contestation over the knee-taking gesture reflects a growing cultural divide between the disconnected globalist elites and the more grounded and situated masses who often opposed those who demand their acquiescence towards this performative form of anti-racism. Full article

The expressions on human faces reveal the emotions we are experiencing internally. Emotion recognition based on facial expression is one of the subfields of social signal processing. It has several applications in different areas, specifically in the interaction between humans and computers. This study presents a simple CCNN-SVM automated model as a viable approach for FER. The model combines a Convolutional Neural Network for feature extraction, certain image preprocessing techniques, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. Firstly, the input image is preprocessed using face detection, histogram equalization, gamma correction, and resizing techniques. Secondly, the images go through custom single Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CCNN) to extract deep features. Finally, SVM uses the generated features to perform the classification. The suggested model was trained and tested on four datasets, CK+, JAFFE, KDEF, and FER. These datasets consist of seven primary emotional categories, which encompass anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutrality for CK+, and include contempt for JAFFE. The model put forward demonstrates commendable performance in comparison to existing facial expression recognition techniques. It achieves an impressive accuracy of $99.3\%$ on the CK+ dataset, $98.4\%$ on the JAFFE dataset, $87.18\%$ on the KDEF dataset, and $88.7\%$ on the FER. Full article

The confrontation between Greek philosophy and the Biblical heritage has led to a wealth of different currents, varying from Christian and Jewish neo-Platonism to religious convictions that proclaim a complete rupture between creation and the highest hidden god. Although this rupture has its roots in a Platonic concept of a demiurge who as a lower divinity is supposed to be responsible for creation, in Gnosticism this chasm has been deepened to become no less than an abhorrence for embodied “material” existence, together with sheer contempt for the demiurge who is described as jealous, foolish and blind. Freeing the divine element/spark from the imprisonment in matter, an imprisonment concocted by this jealous demiurge, is the general aim of many Gnostic tracts. In the Hypostasis of the Archons, wisdom from above, surprisingly often gendered as female, but not as embodied, serves as a redeemer figure, named Sophia. This has led to an exegesis of revolt in which Eve becomes the source of this higher Wisdom, strengthened by the serpent of the Biblical story of Paradise, who likewise symbolizes this higher Wisdom. Full article

Why is contempt seen as potentially lacking in the respect for persons and therefore prima facie subject to negative moral evaluation? This paper starts by looking at a distinctive feature of contempt in the context of thick relationships, such as those of friendship, close professional collaboration, or romantic love: there is an irreversibility effect attached to the experience of contempt. Once contempt occurs in a thick relationship, it seems very difficult to return to non-contemptuous reactive attitudes. The second part argues that the irreversibility effect is due to the fact that contempt is an affective attitude which tends to invisibilize the person who is the object of contempt. The tendency to invisibilize is inscribed in the intentional structure of contempt as well as in its motivational dimension. The final part explores some consequences of this hypothesis, and in particular argues that it also explains why contempt motivated by abject wrongdoing, as opposed to resentment, anger, or hatred, tends to block any process of forgiveness. Full article

Objectives: Night eating syndrome (NES) is classified as a delay of food intake, reflected by consuming large amounts after the evening meal or ingesting food after sleep onset (DSM-5). This article aims to describe NES experience, awareness, narratives, and behavior from the perspectives of patients with NES in light of their history of traumatic life events. Method: Semi-structured interviews based on the phenomenological approach were conducted with 18 women (aged 19–60) diagnosed with NES. Results: The analysis raised two themes: 1. References to NES as an experience that represents the darker sides of patients’ behaviors and involves helplessness, contempt, self-loathing, and a loss of control. Patients also related to difficult memories concerning sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. 2. References to the comforting side of NES patients’ behaviors that involves soothing, regulating, emotional disconnecting, and a sense of calm, control, and the ability to function. Conclusion: Findings present the relationship between traumatic life events, dissociation, and EDs. Clinically, they highlight the importance of an early assessment and a traumatic life history and suggest giving special treatment attention to the role of dissociation and night eating as regulatory mechanisms in the therapeutic process and alliance. Full article

The purpose of this study was to examine competing hypotheses (positive vs. negative) on how organizational members’ familiarity with multiple stakeholders differentially relates to members’ social identity and perception of leadership styles grounded in relational and emotional factors. Specifically, we developed and tested a conceptual model wherein employees’ familiarity with leaders, colleagues, and externals plays a differential role in predicting the extent to which they identify with their workgroup (i.e., group member prototypicality—GMP) and perceive transformational, authentic, leader–member exchange and servant leadership styles. Moreover, we examined the moderating effect of combat experience. We tested this nomological network using structural equation modeling and invariance analyses on a sample of 435 military personnel from the Italian Army (228 combat, 207 non-combat). Results indicated an invariant pattern of relationships among variables for combat and non-combat sub-samples. Specifically, familiarity with leaders positively predicted all leadership styles and GMP. Familiarity with colleagues positively predicted only GMP, whereas familiarity with externals did not predict GMP or leadership factors. Moreover, post hoc quadratic regressions showed a curvilinear inverted-U-shaped relationship between familiarity with colleagues and GMP. Militaries with low or high levels of familiarity with colleagues reported lower levels of GMP compared to militaries with moderate levels of familiarity with colleagues. Hence, at very high levels of familiarity with colleagues, GMP begins to decrease. Theoretical and practical implications of results are discussed in light of the increasing relevance of relational and emotional factors for military leadership, and the current pandemic and geopolitical turmoil. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted society, having led to a lack of social skills in children who became used to interacting with others while wearing masks. To analyze this issue, we investigated the effects of masks on face identification and facial expression recognition, using deep learning models for these operations. The results showed that when using the upper or lower facial regions for face identification, the upper facial region allowed for an accuracy of 81.36%, and the lower facial region allowed for an accuracy of 55.52%. Regarding facial expression recognition, the upper facial region allowed for an accuracy of 39% compared to 49% for the lower facial region. Furthermore, our analysis was conducted for a number of facial expressions, and specific emotions such as happiness and contempt were difficult to distinguish using only the upper facial region. Because this study used a model trained on data generated from human labeling, it is assumed that the effects on humans would be similar. Therefore, this study is significant because it provides engineering evidence of a decline in facial expression recognition; however, wearing masks does not cause difficulties in identification. Full article

Cognitive coping strategies to deal with anxiety-provoking events have an impact on mental and physical health. Dispositional vigilance is characterized by an increased analysis of the threatening environment, whereas cognitive avoidance comprises strategies to inhibit threat processing. To date, functional neuroimaging studies on the neural underpinnings of these coping styles are scarce and have revealed discrepant findings. In the present study, we examined automatic brain responsiveness as a function of coping styles using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We administered a perceptual load paradigm with contemptuous and fearful faces as distractor stimuli in a sample of N = 43 healthy participants. The Mainz Coping Inventory was used to assess cognitive avoidance and vigilance. An association of cognitive avoidance with reduced contempt and fear processing under high perceptual load was observed in a widespread network including the amygdala, thalamus, cingulate gyrus, insula, and frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital areas. Our findings indicate that the dispositional tendency to divert one’s attention away from distressing stimuli is a valuable predictor of diminished automatic neural responses to threat in several cortical and subcortical areas. A reduced processing in brain regions involved in emotion perception and attention might indicate a potential threat resilience associated with cognitive avoidance. Full article

This paper proposes facial expression recognition (FER) with the wild data set. In particular, this paper chiefly deals with two issues, occlusion and intra-similarity problems. The attention mechanism enables one to use the most relevant areas of facial images for specific expressions, and the triplet loss function solves the intra-similarity problem that sometimes fails to aggregate the same expression from different faces and vice versa. The proposed approach for the FER is robust to occlusion, and it uses a spatial transformer network (STN) with an attention mechanism to utilize specific facial region that dominantly contributes (or that is the most relevant) to particular facial expressions, e.g., anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. In addition, the STN model is connected to the triplet loss function to improve the recognition rate which outperforms the existing approaches that employ cross-entropy or other approaches using only deep neural networks or classical methods. The triplet loss module alleviates limitations of the intra-similarity problem, leading to further improvement of the classification. Experimental results are provided to substantiate the proposed approach for FER, and the result outperforms the recognition rate in more practical cases, e.g., occlusion. The quantitative result provides FER results with more than $2.09\%$ higher accuracy compared to the existing FER results in CK+ data sets and $0.48\%$ higher than the accuracy of the results with the modified ResNet model in the FER2013 data set. Full article

Facial emotion recognition (FER) is an important and developing topic of research in the field of pattern recognition. The effective application of facial emotion analysis is gaining popularity in surveillance footage, expression analysis, activity recognition, home automation, computer games, stress treatment, patient observation, depression, psychoanalysis, and robotics. Robot interfaces, emotion-aware smart agent systems, and efficient human–computer interaction all benefit greatly from facial expression recognition. This has garnered attention as a key prospect in recent years. However, due to shortcomings in the presence of occlusions, fluctuations in lighting, and changes in physical appearance, research on emotion recognition has to be improved. This paper proposes a new architecture design of a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the FER system and contains five convolution layers, one fully connected layer with rectified linear unit activation function, and a SoftMax layer. Additionally, the feature map enhancement is applied to accomplish a higher detection rate and higher precision. Lastly, an application is developed that mitigates the effects of the aforementioned problems and can identify the basic expressions of human emotions, such as joy, grief, surprise, fear, contempt, anger, etc. Results indicate that the proposed CNN achieves 92.66% accuracy with mixed datasets, while the accuracy for the cross dataset is 94.94%. Full article