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In this chapter the major conservation issues bears face is reviewed and management actions that can address these conservation issues are highlighted. The future of bears across the world is bright for some species but dark for others. In some areas such as North America and in parts of Europe and Asia, bear populations have increased and stabilized because of increased management effort and increasing support for bears and their needs by the humans who share habitat with them. However, for most bear species, the future is uncertain. Andean bears continue to be threatened by habitat loss and human encroachment. In much of Asia outside Japan, Asiatic black bear, sloth bear, and sun bear populations are increasingly threatened by unmanaged excessive mortality combined with habitat loss to timber harvest, plantation agriculture, and human encroachment. The long-term future for polar bears is threatened by the unmanageable threat of climate change. Giant pandas are fragmented into small populations despite intense conservation efforts. Improving public and political support for bears is the most important need if we are to realize successful bear conservation and management.
In its first national strategy on dementia, the Government of Canada has highlighted the need to improve quality of care for individuals living with dementia, with emphasis on following best practices and evidence in care delivery and providing care staff access to education and training. It is also known that the design of the physical environment of care homes is integral to the care experience of individuals living with dementia. Therefore, this study aims to identify the best national and international practices implemented in care homes for people living with dementia in: (1) education, training, staffing, and care practices; and (2) environmental design and physical infrastructure, through the review of relevant grey literature. This article highlights key recommendations for improving the quality of care for residents living with dementia in care homes, such as: (1) facilitating translation of training into practice, (2) maintaining consistent staffing levels, and (3) designing care homes to facilitate wayfinding, accessibility, safety, comfort, appropriate sensory stimulation, familiarity, and homelikeness. The findings from this review are expected to inform the development of guidelines for a provincial dementia-friendly care home designation program and various advocacy efforts to help achieve the objectives of the national strategy on dementia.
We introduce the Politics and the Life Sciences Special Issue on Disgust and Political Attitudes discussing the importance of understanding state and trait disgust, the innovative and transparent process by which registered reports and preregistered studies were chosen and funded, and the manuscripts that make up this special issue. This essay concludes by discussing future research directions in disgust and political attitudes, as well as the benefits of a transparent review process that avoids the “file drawer problem” of unpublished null findings.
Disgust is derived from evolutionary processes to avoid pathogen contamination. Theories of gender differences in pathogen disgust utilize both evolutionary psychological and sociocultural perspectives. Drawing on research that suggests that masculine and feminine gender identities are somewhat orthogonal, we examine how gender identity intersects with pathogen disgust. In addition, building on evolutionary psychological and sociocultural accounts of how caregiving and parental investment affect pathogen disgust, we present a new measure of caregiving disgust and compare its properties across gender, parental status, and political ideology with those of a conventional pathogen disgust measure. This registered report finds that how masculinity and femininity affect disgust varies by gender, disgust domain, and their intersection; that parental status effects vary by disgust domain but not gender; that reframing disgust in terms of caregiving eliminates the gender gap in disgust; and that the caregiving frame unexpectedly strengthens the relationship between disgust and political ideology.
Many U.S. states have proposed policies that restrict bathroom access to an individual’s birth sex. These policies have had widespread effects on safety for transgender and gender-nonconforming people, as well as on state economies. In this registered report, we assessed the role of disgust in support for policies that restrict transgender bathroom access. We found that sensitivity to pathogen disgust was positively associated with support for bathroom restrictions; sexual and injury disgust were unrelated. We also examined the role of disgust-driven moral concerns, known as purity concerns, as well as harm-related moral concerns in support for bathroom restrictions. While concerns about harm to cisgender and transgender people predicted support for bathroom restrictions, purity was a much stronger predictor. Also, purity partially mediated the link between pathogen disgust and support for bathroom restrictions, even after accounting for harm concerns. Findings and implications are discussed.
What causes people to see their political attitudes in a moral light? One answer is that attitude moralization results from associating one’s attitude stance with feelings of disgust. To test the possibility that disgust moralizes, the current study used a high-powered preregistered design looking at within-person change in moral conviction paired with an experimental manipulation of disgust or anger (versus control). Results from the preregistered analyses found that we successfully induced anger but not disgust; however, our manipulation had no effect on moral conviction. Additional exploratory analyses investigating whether emotion and harm predicted increases in moral conviction over time found that neither disgust, anger, nor sadness had an effect on moralization, whereas perceptions of harm did predict moralization. Our findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current theory and research into attitude moralization.
In the political domain, disgust is primarily portrayed as an emotion that explains individual differences in pathogen avoidance. We hypothesized that political rhetoric accusing opponents of moral transgressions also elicits disgust responses. In this registered report, we present the results from a laboratory experiment. We find that participants self-report higher disgust and have stronger physiological (Levator labii) responses to pictures of out-party leaders compared with in-party leaders. Participants also report higher disgust in response to moral violations of in-party leaders. There is more suggestive evidence that in-party leaders evoke more labii activity when they commit moral violations than when out-party leaders do. The impact of individual differences in moral disgust and partisanship strength is very limited to absent. Intriguingly, on average, the physiological and self-reported disgust responses to the treatment are similar, but individuals differ in whether their response is physiological or cognitive. This motivates further theorizing regarding the concordance of emotional responses.
Recent advances in gene editing technology promise much for medical advances and human well-being. However, in parallel domains, there have been objections to the use of such biotechnologies. Moreover, the psychological factors that govern the willingness to use gene editing technology have been underexplored to date. In this registered report, we sought to test whether pathogen disgust sensitivity is linked with opposition to gene editing. U.K.-based adult participants (N = 347) were recruited to this study. Gene editing attitudes reflected two largely distinct latent factors concerning enhancing human traits and treating medical disorders. In contrast to prediction, pathogen disgust sensitivity was related to greater support for gene editing in both of these domains. This result suggests that gene editing, at least in the current study, is not viewed as pathogenic, or that the perceived benefits of gene editing outweigh any perceived pathogen risk.
Disgust has been consistently associated with greater political conservatism. Two explanations have been proposed for this link. According to a pathogen threat model, disgust serves a pathogen-avoidance function, encouraging more conservative ideology, whereas a sexual strategies model suggests that this link is explained by variability in short-term versus long-term mating goals. In two preregistered studies using a college student and community sample (total N = 1,950), we examined whether experimentally manipulating pathogen threat and mate availability produced differences in political ideology and whether these differences were explained by disgust and sociosexual attitudes. Across both studies, we did not find evidence that manipulating pathogen threat or mate availability resulted in change in political ideology. In Study 1, manipulating mate availability was indirectly associated with greater political conservativism through stronger sociosexual attitudes that favor monogamy. These findings failed to replicate in Study 2. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.
XRF maps of a uranium ore sample have been analyzed using software that allows the graphical spatial correlations of all detected elements to be measured. The association of uranium with arsenic, nickel and cesium was explored; all showed unique finely-granular microscopic patterns that could be used to assist the recovery of uranium and rare earths.
Little is known about methylphenidate (MPH) use and mortality outcomes.
Aims
To investigate the association between MPH use and mortality among children with an attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis.
Method
This population-based cohort study analysed data from Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD). A total of 68 096 children and adolescents aged 4–17 years with an ADHD diagnosis and prescribed MPH between 2000 and 2010 were compared with 68 096 without an MPH prescription, matched on age, gender and year of first ADHD diagnosis. All participants were followed to death, migration, withdrawal from the National Health Insurance programme or 31 December 2013. MPH prescriptions were measured on a yearly basis during the study period, and the association between MPH use and mortality was analysed using a repeated-measures time-dependent Cox regression model. The outcome measures included all-cause, unnatural-cause (including suicide, accident and homicide) and natural-cause mortality, obtained from linkage to the National Mortality Register in Taiwan.
Results
The MPH group had lower unadjusted all-cause, natural-, unnatural- and accident-cause mortality than the comparison group. After controlling for potential confounders, MPH use was associated with a significantly lower all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio AHR = 0.81, 95% CI 0.67–0.98, P = 0.027), delayed use of MPH was associated with higher mortality (AHR = 1.05, 95% CI 1.01–1.09) and longer MPH use was associated with lower mortality (AHR = 0.83, 95% CI 0.70–0.98).
Conclusions
MPH use is associated with a reduced overall mortality in children with ADHD in this cohort study, but unmeasured confounding cannot be excluded absolutely.
A number of genomic conditions caused by copy number variants (CNVs) are associated with a high risk of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (ND-CNVs). Although these patients also tend to have cognitive impairments, few studies have investigated the range of emotion and behaviour problems in young people with ND-CNVs using measures that are suitable for those with learning difficulties.
Methods
A total of 322 young people with 13 ND-CNVs across eight loci (mean age: 9.79 years, range: 6.02–17.91, 66.5% male) took part in the study. Primary carers completed the Developmental Behaviour Checklist (DBC).
Results
Of the total, 69% of individuals with an ND-CNV screened positive for clinically significant difficulties. Young people from families with higher incomes (OR = 0.71, CI = 0.55–0.91, p = .008) were less likely to screen positive. The rate of difficulties differed depending on ND-CNV genotype (χ2 = 39.99, p < 0.001), with the lowest rate in young people with 22q11.2 deletion (45.7%) and the highest in those with 1q21.1 deletion (93.8%). Specific patterns of strengths and weaknesses were found for different ND-CNV genotypes. However, ND-CNV genotype explained no more than 9–16% of the variance, depending on DBC subdomain.
Conclusions
Emotion and behaviour problems are common in young people with ND-CNVs. The ND-CNV specific patterns we find can provide a basis for more tailored support. More research is needed to better understand the variation in emotion and behaviour problems not accounted for by genotype.
PsychTable.org is a new online, mass-collaborative tool for the social sciences that aggregates evidence for and classifies the evolved psychological adaptations (EPAs) that have been proposed to comprise the human mind. This article provides an overview of the need for this reference tool and how it can benefit researchers who incorporate the behavioral sciences into their work. The article walks the reader through a hypothetical use case for PsychTable.org and describes the features of the website. PsychTable.org is intended to help key stakeholders better understand the linkages between EPAs and political behavior, public policy, and ethics.
[…] the courageous man's fears are great and many.
‒ Aristotle EE1228b
The emotion of ‘fear’ takes centre stage in the Vandal War. I am certainly not the first to notice this emphasis. Recent scholarship has underlined Procopius’ stress on the febrile anxiety that gripped Constantinople when the Emperor Justinian announced his military expedition to recover the former Roman territories of North Africa from the Vandals in the summer of 533.
According to Procopius, the generals, who had just waged a series of hard-fought land campaigns against Persia, were reluctant to launch a sea invasion of a realm that had been out of Roman hands for over a century:
Each of the generals, supposing that he himself would command the army, was in terror [ϰατωρρώδϵι] and dread [ἀπώϰνϵι] at the greatness of the danger, if it should be necessary for him—assuming he survived the perils of the sea—to encamp in enemy land and, using his ships as a base, to engage in a war against a kingdom both large and formidable.
The memory of a botched military expedition in 468 against the Vandals had clearly left its mark on the Roman psyche. This defeat had seen a formidable Roman naval force devastated by Vandal fire-ships just off the shores of North Africa, and had left both halves of the empire's pride dented, and their finances depleted. In spite of that, Procopius reports that the Roman generals were too frightened to speak up. Only the praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian, a man denigrated by the historian throughout the Wars, had the nerve to warn the emperor about the financial and political ramifications of such a venture. Heeding John's advice, Justinian relented, temporarily abandoning his plan.
It takes a religious vision to change the devout emperor's mind. Procopius describes how a visiting bishop related to the emperor a dream where God commanded the bishop to remind Justinian that ‘after undertaking the task of protecting Christians in Libya from tyrants’ the emperor ‘for no good reason had become afraid [ϰατωρρώδησϵ]’. God, the bishop reassured, would be fighting on Justinian's side ‘and make him master of Libya’.
Justinian's eunuch general Narses has long earned historians’ respect. He deserves this acclaim since his key victories over the Goths in 552 and versus the Franks and Alamanni in 554 helped to secure Justinian's defeat of the Goths in Italy after an arduous nineteen-year struggle. So too did Narses perform admirably for twelve years in his role as prefect of Italy. Of course, it has always been important to highlight that Narses was a eunuch. Indeed, for many modern historians, Narses’ identity as a castrate is more important for study than his military deeds and political achievements, which proved ephemeral. For some, the presence of a eunuch in such an essential military role indicates a turn away from codes of generalship based on traditional martial courage and manliness. This chapter questions this view, suggesting that Byzantines like Procopius had more flexible notions of eunuchs’ gender status than some recent scholarship allows. By comparing Procopius and other Byzantine writers’ presentation of these eunuch generals, with Procopius’ highly gendered portrait of Belisarius in the Secret History, I will argue that Narses and the other chief eunuch general, Solomon, fit into a continuing hegemony of traditional masculine values based on the supremacy of Byzantine men's martial virtues. Moreover, this two-part chapter examines the significance of eunuchs taking on powerful political and military roles in the newly ‘reconquered’ territories in North Africa and Italy. As symbols of Byzantine imperial power and otherness, influential eunuchs like Solomon and Narses offer a stimulating instrument to examine how Byzantine culture was translated and transported to North Africa, Italy, and post-Roman Europe.
The Blame Game
Superficially, the argument that eunuchs’ increased military role marks a turn away from martial masculinity as a part of Byzantine ideology appears attractive. The Byzantine period saw eunuchs playing important roles at all levels of court society. Although their primary function throughout the Byzantine era remained service within the imperial palace, Narses was one of three eunuchs to command Byzantine armies during Justinian's reign. The eunuch Solomon was magister militum and praetorian prefect of Africa. Another castrate, Scholasticus, served as commander of an army sent against the Sklavenoi in 551. The number of eunuch generals only grew larger in later centuries.