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In Rethinking Multilingual Experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism (Titone & Tiv, 2022), we encouraged psycholinguists and cognitive neuroscientists to consider integrating social and ecological aspects of multilingualism into a collective understanding of its cognitive and neurocognitive bases (i.e., to rethink experience). We then offered a framework – the Systems Framework of Bilingualism– and described empirical challenges and potential solutions with applying this framework to new research. Since the paper's publication, several eminent colleagues read and commented on our Keynote, noting both its strengths and areas for improvement. We read each commentary with enthusiasm and gratitude. Here, we briefly respond to several salient points raised, which led us to clarify and improve our theoretical approach. We first address what the commentaries agreed were strengths of the framework. We follow this with a discussion of what the commentaries stated could be improved or extended. We conclude with ways that we modified our model to collectively address concerns raised in the commentaries.
Stereotypic behaviour is generally associated with animals maintained in restrictive environments, and has rarely been described in wild or free-ranging animals. The difference between captive and wild populations may be due to their genetic predisposition or to experience of environmental factors. To investigate genetic and environmental factors, we compared the behaviour of 12 wild caught voles and their 9 pups with that of 12 laboratory reared voles and 14 laboratory bred pups. All voles were observed twice. Adults were observed after 10 days housing in a cage, containing food, water, sawdust and hay, and again after 60 days. Pups were observed in the same cages 10 and 60 days after weaning. For each observation, the voles’ behaviour was recorded both undisturbed in this cage, and following introduction to an unfamiliar cage. Locomotor stereotypies were observed in laboratory adults, but not in wild caught voles, which spent less time on all locomotor activities and more time under cover than laboratory voles. There was no difference in mortality or fecundity of laboratory and wild caught voles, so there appeared to be no selective advantage to stereotyping. There was no difference in the behaviour of wild and laboratory pups, so early environmental experience of the cage environment, rather than parental background, was an important factor in the development of locomotor stereotypies in this species. Pups that developed stereotypies by 60 days spent less time under cover and more time walking and climbing after 10 days than voles that did not develop stereotypic behaviour. Stereotypic behaviour may therefore have been derived from persistence of locomotor behaviour. Wild caught voles may have failed to develop locomotor stereotypies, either because they did not perform a locomotor response to captivity or because older voles are less prone to develop novel responses to external cues. It would, therefore, be dangerous to use the absence of stereotypic behaviour as a reliable indicator of welfare without taking into account the animal's prior experience.
As the US tests models of care for the seriously ill, patient perceptions of the quality of care are important. Proxies are often needed for this group. We sought to understand the potential impact of proxy reports for the assessment of care quality and experience in cancer.
Methods
Secondary data analysis of a deidentified prospective study that included surveys of perceived care quality, including symptom management, from patients with advanced cancer receiving chemotherapy and their caregivers. Surveys were administered at diagnosis (time 1) and treatment (time 2), with top-box scoring used for analysis. Overall concordance was assessed using metrics including Gwet’s AC1. The proportion of the highest scores by respondent type within 2 subgroups were examined: (1) symptom burden and (2) practice setting.
Results
Data from 83 dyads were analyzed. Proxies and patients frequently reported the highest scores for quality (time 1: proxies: 77% and patients: 80%). At time 1, 14% of proxies and 10% of patients reported an unmet need for symptom palliation. Most patients reporting an unmet need gave the top score for quality (75%), but fewer proxies did so (45%). Proxy and patient reports were similar within practice settings. Concordance was at least moderate (nearly all outcomes >0.5 and some >0.8) by Gwet’s AC1.
Significance of results
Findings of at least moderate concordance and similar experience outcomes within subgroups suggest the use of proxies may not change estimates substantially. However, consideration should be taken when evaluating symptom management, particularly if such evaluations inform assessment of provider performance.
Focusing on the various rounds of debates between the 1620s and 1640s on whether or how to seek peace or truce in the war with the Dutch Republic, this explores how agents and counsellors from different parts of the Spanish monarchy navigated the conflict between ideology and necessity-driven pragmatism in contexts of concrete decision-making. Directed at preserving and re-establishing dominion over the various realms of the monarchy, reason of state was at the heart of this weighing of principle and pragmatism. Agents were at the centre of a constant cycle of collecting and assessing information, projecting likely future courses and searching for the utmost expedience within the boundaries of royal conscience and obligations. What solutions were conceivable when attempts to preserve dominion over the Low Countries ran contrary to the demands of the Catholic faith and the preservation of the rest of the monarchy? Could special circumstances allow for special measures or concessions that might deviate from the princely obligations towards justice and the Faith? The chapter shows that as each decade of the war added to its own history, pragmatic arguments and solutions were often inspired by experience, together with a notion of extenuating necessity.
The increasing number of Covid-19 cases, as well as the overwhelming workload, constitute a serious occupational health threat to Emergency Room (ER) nurses working on the frontlines. In Lebanon, where unstable socio-economic conditions reign, the Covid-19 outbreak was added to the plethora of daily challenges faced by the healthcare workers. The study’s objective is to explore how Lebanese ER nurses perceived their duty on the frontlines amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
METHODS:
This study has a descriptive exploratory qualitative design. Fifteen Lebanese ER nurses working directly with Covid-19 patients were recruited from three university hospitals in Beirut. Interviews were held for data collection until data saturation. Subsequent analysis was done via coding of the transcribed verbatim.
RESULTS:
The findings showed significant gaps related to preparedness, support and governmental action. Similarly, the frontliners faced serious challenges that increased their stress levels both physically and mentally. Furthermore, some participants were subject to stigma and had to face irresponsible behaviors during triage. Participants emphasized the need to guarantee a safe environment at work, to provide Covid-19 patients with the needed care.
CONCLUSIONS:
ER nurses struggled during this pandemic while working on the frontlines. They described their experience as not satisfying, with high levels of stress, danger and challenges.
Two experiments explored how the context of recently experiencing an abundance of positive or negative outcomes within a series of choices influences risk preferences. In each experiment, choices were made between a series of pairs of hypothetical 50/50 two-outcome gambles. Participants experienced a control set of mixed outcome gamble pairs intermingled with a randomly assigned set of (a) all-gain, (b) all-loss, or (c) a mixture of all-gain and all-loss gamble pairs. In both experiments, a positive experience led to reduced risk taking in the control set and a negative experience led to increased risk taking. These patterns persisted even after the all-gain and all-loss gamble pairs were no longer present. In addition, we showed that the good luck attributed to positive experiences was associated with decreased, rather than increased, risk taking. These results ran counter to the house money effect, and could not readily be accounted for by changes in assets. We suggest that the goals associated with the predominant valence are likely to be assimilated and applied to other choices within a given situation. We also discuss the need to learn more about the characteristics of choice bracketing and mental accounting that influence which aspects of situational context will be included or excluded from consideration when making each choice.
Evidence, anecdotal and scientific, suggests that people treat (or are affected by) products of prestigious sources differently than those of less prestigious, or of anonymous, sources. The “products” which are the focus of the present study are poems, and the “sources” are the poets. We explore the manner in which the poet’s name affects the experience of reading a poem. Study 1 establishes the effect we wish to address: a poet’s reputation enhances the evaluation of a poem. Study 2 asks whether it is only the reported evaluation of the poem that is enhanced by the poet’s name (as was the case for The Emperor’s New Clothes) or the enhancement is genuine and unaware. Finding for the latter, Study 3 explores whether the poet’s name changes the reader’s experience of it, so that in a sense one is reading a “different” poem. We conclude that it is not so much that the attributed poem really differs from the unattributed poem, as that it is just ineffably better. The name of a highly regarded poet seems to prime quality, and the poem becomes somehow better. This is a more subtle bias than the deliberate one rejected in Study 2, but it is a bias nonetheless. Ethical implications of this kind of effect are discussed.
Decision making is a multifaceted process but studies of individual differences in decision behavior typically use only the proportions of choices from different options as behavioral indices. I examine whether the probability of choice switching in decisions from experience, reflecting one’s exploration strategy, is consistent across sessions and tasks. In Study 1, I re-analyzed an experiment in which participants performed six decision tasks in two sessions that were 45 days apart. Choice switching rates were highly consistent across sessions and tasks, and their consistency exceeded that of rates of risky choices. In Study 2 I conducted a similar analysis for the Technion Prediction Tournament, and also found higher consistency across tasks in switching rates than in choice rates. Additionally, in both studies, there were moderate to high correlations between switching rates at the beginning and towards the end of the task. The results thus highlight an often overlooked but highly consistent and independent aspect of human behavior.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned against administering over-the-counter cough and cold medicines to children under 2. This study evaluated whether experienced parents show poorer adherence to the FDA warning, as safe experiences are predicted to reduce the impact of warnings, and how adherence can be improved. Participants included 218 American parents (mean age: 29.98 (SD = 6.16), 82.9% female) with children age ≤ 2 who were aware of the FDA warning. We compared adherence among experienced (N=142; with other children > age 2) and inexperienced parents (N=76; only children ≤2). We also evaluated potential moderating variables (amount of warning-related information received, prevalence of side effects, trust in the FDA, frequency of coughs and colds, trust in drug packaging) and quantified the impact of amount of information. Logistic regression assessed the ability of experience alone, and experience combined with amount of information, to predict adherence. 53.3% of inexperienced but 28.4% of experienced parents were adherent (p = 0.0003). The groups did not differ on potential moderating variables. Adherence was 39.5% among experienced parents receiving “a lot of information”, but 15.4% for those receiving less (p = 0.002); amount of information did not affect adherence in inexperienced parents (p = 0.22) but uniquely predicted adherence compared to a model with experience alone (p = 0.0005). Experienced parents were also less likely to mistrust drug packaging (p = 0.03). Targeting FDA information to experienced parents, particularly via drug packaging, may improve their adherence.
Chapter 1 introduces the major themes of the book. I argue that the idea of divine revelation does not make much sense in the contemporary world, because it is primarily thought about in terms of beliefs rather than experience. Philosophically, experience is (i) what happens at the point of opening in the world, which is a given instance of life, as well as (ii) conscious reflection on that experience as it is lived. For both senses of the word, using a hermeneutic-phenomenological methodology, it is possible to speak of prepredicative experience – that is, what takes place (or 'events') prior to thematisation in language. I argue that it is the prepredicative sense of experience that is engaged in revelation. This is because God cannot be made an 'object' of experience. Now, since in modern life, the word ‘belief’ risks coming to mean simply what is untrue or subjective, it is no longer very helpful in communicating something about God. In contrast, 'the event' can be used to consider the possibility of encountering a God who reveals Godself in person. To conclude the introduction, I set out how my argument about experience and the 'event' is carried through each chapter.
This chapter explores the beginning of the end of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility and the origins of surgical scientific modernity. It illuminates this crucial period of transition through the juxtaposition of two distinct but conceptually and ideologically intertwined moments in surgical history. These are, firstly, the debates surrounding the practice of anatomical dissection that came to the fore in the 1820s and culminated in the passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832, and, secondly, the introduction and early use of inhalation anaesthesia in the later 1840s. In both instances it highlights the powerful influence of utilitarian thought in divesting the body, both as object and subject, of emotional meaning and agency. In the former instance it demonstrates how an ultra-rationalist understanding of sentiment was set in opposition to popular ‘sentimentalism’ in order to divest the dead bodies of the poor of emotional value. Meanwhile, in the latter, it considers how the emotional subjectivity of the newly anaesthetised patient was swiftly tamed by the operations of a techno-scientific rationale.
This chapter considers Romantic surgery from the patient’s perspective. It uses Astley Cooper’s rich archive of personal correspondence to explore the complex emotions associated with the experience of surgical illness and its treatment, as well as the ways in which emotional expression functioned as a form of agency within the private surgical relationship. In addition to considering private patients, this chapter also examines how emotions expressed and mediated agency within what, following Michel Foucault, we might consider the ‘disciplinary’ space of the hospital. The pre-anaesthetic surgical patient was a deeply unstable and ‘messy’ ontological entity whose pre-operative health and post-operative recovery were determined by a complex melding of constitutional, nervous, and emotional factors. Thus, as this chapter demonstrates, the patient’s own body could exert an unconscious material agency, often frustrating both surgical intervention and the patient’s own will, something that was most evident in the associations between irritability and obstreperousness that characterised contemporary discourses on amputation and its discontents.
In the final chapter, I examine the question of revelation by looking again at the Emmaus story. In the generally accepted reading of this text, it is a story about moving from blindness to sight. I argue that the event of revelation is more nuanced than this reading allows. God is revealed to the disciples in the event of their burning hearts on the road, in a presence in the affect to which they only advert afterwards (Lacoste). The disciples personally recognise Jesus in the event of the breaking of the bread, in the saturated phenomenon of his appearing and disappearing (using the tools of Marion, otherwise). And Cleopas and his companion reveal the God of Jesus Christ in the event of their joyful witness to the other disciples back in Jerusalem, and in their personal transformation (Romano). That divine revelation might be one of the possibilities of a hermeneutic of the event allows sufficient ambivalence between the immanent and the transcendent to accommodate readings that might sometimes be plausible either way. Learning to discern the movements of the affect takes seriously, however, the possibility that God reveals Godself in experience through a love that appears to freedom.
Chapter 7 re-examines the ‘book-farming’ controversy of the late eighteenth century. It first highlights the precarious power of book-knowledge, which offered mastery to an educated landowning class, but was a poor substitute for experience. The analysis distinguishes between a weak and a strong critique of agricultural books. The weak critique expressed by authors themselves condemned an overly theoretical approach or the overly speculative ideas in books. The strong critique was expressed in the reported hostility of working farmers, which was fundamentally suspicious of the value of learning about farming from books and challenged the proclaimed authority of writers. It argues that the strong opposition to book-farming can only be understood by considering the balance of power within agricultural labour relations. Hostility to book-farming was a form of ‘everyday resistance’ to the subordination of customary knowledge and the use of books as tools of management in the running of estates and large farms.
This chapter examines cultural exchange, change, and continuity through the lens of population movement: migration, immigration, refugees, displacement, diaspora, and the modes of transportation that brought diverse people into direct engagement with each other.
Schools, hospitals, prisons, and other institutions shape physical experiences and act as organizational entities for many material endeavors. This chapter examines how institutions shape how we interact with material worlds.
Some disagreements are serious, others are footling. There are two disagreements about dreaming. They concern the questions ‘Do we wake or dream?’ and ‘Should we have confidence in dreams or in waking experience?’. The answer, said the Sceptics, is in each case: ‘Who knows?’. According to Galen, the sceptics aren’t serious, and no-one is genuinely puzzled by the questions — the disagreements are of the footling sort. That is true, and philosophically uninteresting. But the sceptical arguments which have exercised philosophers are, as Galen suggests, trifles; and in this case at least it is not difficult to let the fly out of the fly-bottle.
The chapter focuses on the methodological debate between Empiricist and Rationalist schools of medicine, as portrayed in Galen’s early treatise On Medical Experience (Med.Exp.). This dense and philosophically-sophisticated text, preserved for the most part only in an Arabic translation, supposedly presents the substance of a dispute, witnessed by the young Galen, between his Rationalist teacher Pelops and an Empiricist opponent, about the respective roles of experience and reason in medicine. Analysing the arguments on both sides, in particular as they concern the question of inductive generalisation and the nature and validity of the empirical procedure known as epilogimos, the chapter shows how Galen’s presentation of a sequence of responses and counter-responses between the two protagonists serves to prefigure his own complex and hugely influential synthesis of the empirical and rationalist procedures in his own mature methodology.
Kant announces that the Critique of the Power of Judgment will bring his entire critical enterprise to an end. But it is by no means agreed upon that it in fact does so and, if it does, how. In this book, Ido Geiger argues that a principal concern of the third Critique is completing the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. This includes both Kant's analysis of natural beauty and his discussion of teleological judgments of organisms and of nature generally. Geiger's original reading of the third Critique shows that it forms a unified whole - and that it does in fact deliver the final part of Kant's transcendental undertaking. His book will be valuable to all who are interested in Kant's theory of the aesthetic and conceptual purposiveness of nature.
What does ‘write what you know’ mean? The bedrock of human experience is essentially the same in any age and this is part of what writers ‘know’. We bring imagination – and sometimes research – to our own experience when we write. Everything we have lived through is potentially valuable material; writing involves transforming this material. Even inspiration comes from within. The need to top up our own personal reservoir of experience. All ideas begin ‘What if…’ The importance of pushing beyond what we know we can do easily: creativity thrives when we are outside our comfort zone.
‘The magic isn’t out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered: the ingredients are in you right now, in your experience and in your imagination, waiting for you to make the unique connections that will enable you to discover it.’