Individual Mental States Research Articles

The Interrelated Effects between College Students' Subjective Well-being and Self-efficacy

General self-efficacy refers to the overall level of confidence held by an individual in the face of various challenges or new situations. Previous research has revealed that general self-efficacy is strongly associated with an individual's mental health states, such as anxiety and depression. General self-efficacy was significantly and negatively correlated with trait anxiety, test anxiety, and state anxiety, as well as with depression[3] . On the other hand, subjective well-being is an individual's overall evaluation of the quality of life based on his or her own criteria, and it is regarded as an important psychological indicator of the quality of life of individuals and society, which can reflect the quality of life of individuals in society.

Trait-level predictors of human performance outcomes in personnel engaged in stressful laboratory and field tasks.

Personnel performance under stress hinges on various factors, including individual traits, training, context, mental and physiological states, and task demands. This study explored the link between the traits of military personnel and their performance outcomes in five domains: move, shoot, communicate, navigate, and sustain. A total of 387 U.S. Army soldiers participated in this study, undergoing trait assessments covering physical, cognitive, social-emotional, demographic/lifestyle, and health domains. Performance was measured through lab and field events assessing a broad range of individual and team-level skills under conditions demanding resilience to acute cognitive and physical stress exposure. Analysis used feature selection and elastic net regression. Analyses revealed complex associations between traits and performance, with physical, cognitive, health-related, social-emotional, and lifestyle traits playing roles in guiding and constraining performance. Measures of resilience, emotion regulation, grit, and mindfulness were identified as relevant predictors of several performance-related outcomes. Results carry implications for the selection, training, and operational effectiveness of personnel in high-stakes occupations including military and first response. Further research is necessary to explore the mechanisms underlying these associations and inform targeted interventions to boost personnel effectiveness.

An Econometric Analysis to Explore the Temporal Variability of the Factors Affecting Crash Severity Due to COVID-19

This study utilizes multilevel ordinal logistic regression (M-OLR), an approach that accounts for spatial heterogeneity, to assess the dynamics of crash severity in Virginia, USA, over the years 2018 to 2023. This period was notably influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated stay-at-home orders, which significantly altered traffic behaviors and crash severity patterns. This study aims to evaluate the pandemic’s impact on crash severity and examine the consequent changes in driver behaviors. Despite a reduction in total crashes, a worrying increase in the proportion of severe injuries is observed, suggesting that less congested roads during the pandemic led to riskier driving behaviors, notably increased speed violations. This research also highlights heightened risks for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, with changes in transportation habits during the pandemic leading to more severe crashes involving these groups. Additionally, this study emphasizes the consistent influence of environmental and roadway features, like weather conditions and traffic signals, in determining crash outcomes. These findings offer vital insights for road safety policymakers and urban planners, indicating the necessity of adaptive road safety strategies in response to changing societal norms and behaviors. The research underscores the critical role of individual behaviors and mental states in traffic safety management and advocates for holistic approaches to ensure road safety in a rapidly evolving post-pandemic landscape.

Study on William Faulkner's Long Sentence Style Based on “The Sound and the Fury”

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of William Faulkner's narrative technique in "The Sound and the Fury," with a specific focus on his use of long sentences and multi-perspective storytelling. Faulkner's innovative approach to sentence structure is examined as a key element in shaping the novel's thematic depth and emotional resonance. Each section of the novel, presented through different characters' viewpoints, is characterized by unique sentence constructions that reflect individual mental states and emotional experiences. The paper explores how these long, complex sentences enhance the reader's understanding of themes such as time, memory, and identity. Additionally, the interaction between Faulkner's elongated sentences and the multi-perspective narrative is analyzed as a crucial device in conveying the fragmented and chaotic nature of the characters' lives and their broader social context. The paper concludes that Faulkner's work, through its stylistic complexity and depth, continues to resonate as a seminal exploration of the human condition.

Agent‐switching, plight inescapability and corporate agency

AbstractRealists about group agency, according to whom corporate agents may have mental states and perform actions over and above those of their individual members, think that individual agents may switch between participating in individual and corporate agency. My aim is, however, to argue that the inescapability of individual agency spells out a difficulty for this kind of switching – and, therefore, for realism about corporate agency. To do so, I develop Korsgaard's notion of plight inescapability. On my take, it suggests that individual agents are continuously faced with fully exercising their own individual agency (absent external limits at the time of its exercise). But then individual agents may not switch to acting as members of corporate agents, in the sense of taking on irreducible mental states that differ from their own. As it nevertheless is possible to participate fully in the action of a corporate entity, this incompatibility between individual and corporate mental states suggests a challenge for group agent realism.

Digital twins and the future of precision mental health.

Science faces challenges in developing much-needed precision mental health treatments to accurately identify and diagnose mental health problems and the optimal treatment for each individual. Digital twins (DTs) promise to revolutionize the field of mental health, as they are doing in other fields of science, including oncology and cardiology, where they have been successfully deployed. The use of DTs in mental health is yet to be explored. In this Perspective, we lay the conceptual foundations for mental health DTs (MHDT). An MHDT is a virtual representation of an individual's mental states and processes. It is continually updated from data collected over the lifespan of the individual, and guides mental health professionals in diagnosing and treating patients based on mechanistic models and statistical and machine learning tools. The merits of MHDT are demonstrated through the example of the working alliance between the therapist and the patient, which is one of the most consistent mechanisms predicting treatment outcome.

Norms as “Intentional Systems”

The present paper investigates the nature of norms in correlation to the philosophical notions of intentionality and disposition. Following Amselek (2017; 2020), norms are here understood as tools giving the measure of what is possible to do. Intentionality, understood as “being-about”, in relation to norms allows us both to form a description of reality in the norm, and to correct our actions in order to correspond to the norm. Through the notion of disposition, i.e., on the one hand, the linguistic manifestation of the norm and, on the other hand, the physical presence of individual mental states or social states-of-affairs, the paper investigates the “force of norms” and the “mystery of effectiveness”. Elaborating on the notion of “nomotropism”, which highlights the different ways in which a norm may work or operate, and drawing inspiration from Dennett’s philosophy of mind, the paper suggests that legal norms, which allow for the expectation that social behaviors will be measured by specific standards or yardsticks, clearly offer an evolutionary advantage in the regulation of human relationships.

Ascribing Proto-Intentions

How do we understand other individuals’ actions? Answers to this question cluster around two extremes: either by ascribing to the observed individual mental states such as intentions, or without ascribing any mental states. Thus, action understanding is either full-blown mindreading, or not mindreading. An intermediate option is lacking, but would be desirable for interpreting some experimental findings. I provide this intermediate option: actions may be understood by ascribing to the observed individual proto-intentions. Unlike intentions, proto-intentions are subject to context-bound normative constraints, therefore being more widely available across development. Action understanding, when it consists in proto-intention ascription, can be a minimal form of mindreading.

Supportive supervision in improving stress management skills on employees of health social security implementing agency in South Tangerang City

Frontline personnel in South Tangerang City serve participants and prospective participants directly and indirectly. Work is pressure-prone. Supportive supervision is needed to reduce employee stress. This study aims to determine the causes of stress for Health Social Security Implementing Agency employees in South Tangerang City, the implementation of supportive supervision to improve employee stress management, and the factors that support and inhibit supportive supervision in improving employee stress management. This research is descriptive and qualitative. Workload, role ambiguity, participant attitudes, individual mental states of employees, and work support facilities cause stress for Health and Social Security Implementing Agency staff in South Tangerang City, according to this study. To reduce employee stress, supportive supervision is used. South Tangerang's Health Social Security Implementing Agency provides emotional, instrumental, appreciating, informational, social integration, and spiritual support. Role play, sharing sessions, and strong work connections enhance supportive supervision in enhancing employee stress management. Participants' attitudes and employees' personalities are difficulties.

The Thorny Path of Psychology towards "Man with Soul"

The textbook materialistic rejection of the study of the human soul in modern psychology has led to the loss of its primordial subject, which is replaced by a simplified concept of the Psyche (like the Soul) which is not subjected to strict definition. As a result, many facts of the manifestation of an integral soul and primordial spirituality are lost in the constructions of scientific psychology and has not been subjected to convincing conceptual interpretation. The living subject or "person with a soul" (“odushevlennyi” man) is irretrievably lost in numerous models and psychological schemes of personality. This article provides examples of common conceptual psychological simplifications and distortions that automatically lead to inevitable spiritual losses, which are especially expressive and are not allowed in all sections of applied psychology. Effective psychological work is carried out in practice not with individual mental processes, states or properties, but with the whole indivisible human soul. It is the real psychological practice that urgently requires a serious reorganization of scientific psychology, which should become purposefully spiritual and directly addressed to the living human soul. Certain scientific "reserves" in this direction have been already created in domestic science.

Face Masks Protect From Infection but May Impair Social Cognition in Older Adults and People With Dementia.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will have a high impact on older adults and people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Social cognition enables the understanding of another individual's feelings, intentions, desires and mental states, which is particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic. To prevent further spread of the disease face masks have been recommended. Although justified for prevention of this potentially devastating disease, they partly cover the face and hamper emotion recognition and probably mindreading. As social cognition is already affected by aging and dementia, strategies must be developed to cope with these profound changes of communication. Face masking even could accelerate cognitive decline in the long run. Further studies are of uppermost importance to address face masks' impact on social cognition in aging and dementia, for instance by longitudinally investigating decline before and in the pandemic, and to design compensatory strategies. These issues are also relevant for face masking in general, such as in medical surroundings—beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

The representational structure of mental states generalizes across target people and stimulus modalities

Each individual experiences mental states in their own idiosyncratic way, yet perceivers can accurately understand a huge variety of states across unique individuals. How do they accomplish this feat? Do people think about their own anger in the same ways as another person's anger? Is reading about someone's anxiety the same as seeing it? Here, we test the hypothesis that a common conceptual core unites mental state representations across contexts. Across three studies, participants judged the mental states of multiple targets, including a generic other, the self, a socially close other, and a socially distant other. Participants viewed mental state stimuli in multiple modalities, including written scenarios and images. Using representational similarity analysis, we found that brain regions associated with social cognition expressed stable neural representations of mental states across both targets and modalities. Together, these results suggest that people use stable models of mental states across different people and contexts.

Freedom of thought in Europe: do advances in 'brain-reading' technology call for revision?

Since advances in brain-reading technology are changing traditional epistemic boundaries of the mind, yielding information from the brain that enables to draw inferences about particular mental states of individuals, the sustainability of the present framework of European human rights has been called into question. More specifically, it has been argued that in order to provide adequate human rights protection from non-consensual brain-reading, the right to freedom of thought should be revised, making it ‘fit for the future’ again. From the perspective of criminal justice, the present paper examines whether such a revision is necessary within the European legal context. It argues that under its current understanding, the right to freedom of thought would probably not cover the employment of most brain-reading applications in criminal justice. By contrast, the right to freedom of (non-)expression will provide legal protection in this regard and, at the same time, will also allow for certain exceptions. Hence, instead of revising the absolute right to freedom of thought, a legal approach tailored to non-consensual brain-reading could be developed under the already existing right not to convey information, ideas, and opinions as guaranteed under the freedom of (non-)expression. This might need to re-interpret the right to freedom of expression, rather than the right to freedom of thought.

РОЛЬ СИСТЕМЫ Я В САМОРЕГУЛЯЦИИ ПСИХИЧЕСКИХ СОСТОЯНИЙ В ХОДЕ УЧЕБНОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ СТУДЕНТОВ

This article is devoted to the question of the Self-system role in the mental regulation of human states. It analyzes different approaches to the study of relationship between the structures of the Self-system and mental states of a person. The purpose of this work is to establish the relationship between the components of the Self-system and the level of effectiveness in self-regulation of students’ mental states. The research was carried out in three forms of educational activity, different in the tension level: at a lecture, a seminar and an exam. Here are shown the most typical mental states of students with different level of self-regulation efficiency in different forms of educational activity. It was revealed that students with a high level of self-regulation efficiency more intensively experience positive cognitive states, regardless of the educational activity intensity. It was found out that higher manifestations of positive components of selfattitude (self-confidence, self-worth) and lower indicators of internal conflict characterize students with high efficiency of mental states’ self-regulation and self-blame. It was revealed that students with a high level of self-regulation efficiency have a significantly higher level of expression of the self-system components. Were established the leading substructures of mental states and the self-system in each of the forms of students' educational activity. It was found out that in everyday forms of educational activity, the behavior indicator is of the greatest importance, and in a tense examination situation – somatic reactions and cognitive processes. It was shown that as the tension of the situation grows from lecture to exam, the role of the components of self-attitude in the regulation of both individual substructures and mental states of students’ increases.

The brain represents people as the mental states they habitually experience

Social life requires us to treat each person according to their unique disposition. To tailor our behavior to specific individuals, we must represent their idiosyncrasies. Here, we advance the hypothesis that our representations of other people reflect the mental states we perceive those people to habitually experience. We tested this hypothesis by measuring whether neural representations of people could be accurately reconstructed by summing state representations. Separate participants underwent functional MRI while considering famous individuals and individual mental states. Online participants rated how often each famous person experiences each state. Results supported the summed state hypothesis: frequency-weighted sums of state-specific brain activity patterns accurately reconstructed person-specific patterns. Moreover, the summed state account outperformed the established alternative—that people represent others using trait dimensions—in explaining interpersonal similarity. These findings demonstrate that the brain represents people as the sums of the mental states they experience.

Virtue Epistemology: on the 40th Anniversary of the Turn in Analytical Philosophy

The article summarizes the main developments in virtue epistemology and reacts to the challenges faced by the discipline. This new trend in analytic epistemology emerges as a synthesis of a number of directions (metaethics, social epistemology, metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy). On the one hand, it attempts to overcome some weaknesses of classical epistemology and, on the other hand, it performs this on the same basis, retaining the classical understanding of knowledge as justified true belief. It was dubbed “virtue epistemology” since it focuses on restoration of the normative approach and on the opposition to Quine’s naturalism. It explores intellectual virtues like epistemology explores knowledge claims though emphasizing their subject-dependent nature. It is the cognitive agent who provides a foundation for intellectual virtues no matter whether they are understood as cognitive ability or mental traits. However, the most researchers take epistemic virtues as individual mental states available through introspection, and the entire analysis in fact boils down to the articulation of virtue intuitions in the cognitive process. For those intuitions, thought experiments serve as a test simulating everyday cognitive situations. Still, in the context of virtue epistemology some alternative approaches arise, contributing significant revisions to the subject matter and the methods of analytical epistemology. A collective agent replaces an individual one, and knowledge engages in an integral subject-object and subject-subject context. Normativism mitigates its opposition to naturalism, enabling the utilization of the empirical data from the social sciences and humanities. As a result, a dialogue of virtue epistemology with the philosophy and ethics of science gets the chance.

As categorias sob disfarce: uma especificação categorialógica da consideração de D. Dilworth da proveniência das categorias de Peirce em Schiller

Uma análise metodologicamente correta da profundidade e escopo da influência de Schiller sobre o pensamento maduro de Peirce requer três passos: (i) uma análise preliminar das passagens que poderiam sustentar a hipótese de uma influência prolongada e, assim, poderá também indicar seus vetores sistemáticos. No caso de tal análise dar resultados positivos, tornar-se-ia (ii) necessário explorar as juvenilia que documentam a recepção inicial de Peirce de Schiller, para (iii) tentar identificar aquelas ideias que tornam inteligibilidade à re-emergência de Schiller no pensamento de Peirce após 1900. Com base nos resultados que nossa contextualização arquitetônica preliminar das reminiscências de Peirce de seu estudo juvenil das Cartas Estéticas resultaram em um artigo duplo. O presente artigo foca nos segundo e terceiro passos. Logo, nosso propósito é mostrar que a tríplice aparência das categorias de Schiller fazem em seu disfarce – ora como momentos de determinação lógica, ora como estados mentais coletivo e individual de mentes socializadas moldadas pelas relações de unidades psíquicas elementares, e ora como estágios de processos históricos – primeiro agindo como o catalizador para o entendimento inicial de Peirce das deficiências da categoriologia de Kant e, consequentemente, foi ‘fadado’ à re-emergência posterior em consideração a determinar desafios arquitetônicos que Peirce encontrou-se confrontado enquanto trabalhava no redesenho da cenoscopia das ciências filosóficas nos anos de 1900 a 1903. A influência de Schiller exercida sobre Peirce, portanto, origina em sua prefiguração do conceito de Peirce de categorialidade e a coerência dos usos arquitetônicos que ela permite, em especial, como um meio para a estratificação prescisiva dos componentes – fenomenal, normativa e metafísico-entelequial –da experiência comum e os modos de racionalidade ali incorporadas.

Social Knowledge and Supervenience Revisited

Bird’s (Philos Perspect 24:23–56, 2010; in: Lackey (ed) Essays in Collective Epistemology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) account of social knowledge (SK) denies that scientific social knowledge supervenes solely on the mental states of individuals. Lackey (Philos Issues 24:282–298, 2014) objects that SK cannot accommodate (1) a knowledge-action principle and (2) the role of group defeaters. I argue that Lackey’s knowledge-action principle is ambiguous. On one disambiguation, it is false; on the other, it is true but poses no threat to SK. Regarding group defeaters, I argue that there are at least two options available to the defender of SK, both taken from literature on individual defeaters and applied to group defeaters. Finally, I argue that Lackey’s description of the case of Dr. N.—as a case in which the scientific community does not know but is merely in a position to know—is mistaken. It assumes that Dr. N.’s publication is not scientific knowledge. An analogy to the individual case shows that it is plausible that the scientific community is not merely in a position to know, although its members are. This leaves intact a conception of social knowledge on which it does not supervene on the mental states of individuals.

Alignment in social interactions

According to the prevailing paradigm in social-cognitive neuroscience, the mental states of individuals become shared when they adapt to each other in the pursuit of a shared goal. We challenge this view by proposing an alternative approach to the cognitive foundations of social interactions. The central claim of this paper is that social cognition concerns the graded and dynamic process of alignment of individual minds, even in the absence of a shared goal. When individuals reciprocally exchange information about each other's minds processes of alignment unfold over time and across space, creating a social interaction. Not all cases of joint action involve such reciprocal exchange of information. To understand the nature of social interactions, then, we propose that attention should be focused on the manner in which people align words and thoughts, bodily postures and movements, in order to take one another into account and to make full use of socially relevant information.

The rTPJ's overarching cognitive function in networks for attention and theory of mind.

Cortical networks underpinning attentional control and mentalizing converge at the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). It is debated whether the rTPJ is fractionated in neighboring, but separate functional modules underpinning attentional control and mentalizing, or whether one overarching cognitive mechanism explains the rTPJ’s role in both domains. Addressing this question, we combined attentional control and mentalizing in a factorial design within one task. We added a social context condition, in which another individual’s mental states became apparently task-relevant, to a spatial cueing paradigm. This allowed for assessing cue validity- and context-dependent functional activity and effective connectivity of the rTPJ within corresponding cortical networks. We found two discriminable rTPJ subregions, an anterior and a posterior one. Yet, we did not observe a sharp functional dissociation between these two, as both regions responded to attention cueing and social context manipulation. The results suggest that the rTPJ is part of both the ventral attention and the ToM network and that its function is defined by context-dependent coupling with the respective network. We argue that the rTPJ as a functional unit underpins an overarching cognitive mechanism in attentional control and mentalizing and discuss how the present results help to further specify this mechanism.