Normative Feature Research Articles

Conceptual structure of emotions.

Theories of semantic organization have historically prioritized investigation of concrete concepts pertaining to inanimate objects and natural kinds. As a result, accounts of the conceptual representation of emotions have almost exclusively focused on their juxtaposition with concrete concepts. The present study aims to fill this gap by deriving a large set of normative feature data for emotion concepts and assessing similarities and differences between the featural representation of emotion, nonemotion abstract, and concrete concepts. We hypothesized that differences between the experience of emotions (e.g., happiness and sadness) and the experience of other abstract concepts (e.g., equality and tyranny), specifically regarding the relative importance of interoceptive states, might drive distinctions in the dimensions along which emotion concepts are represented. We also predicted, based on constructionist views of emotion, that emotion concepts might demonstrate more variability in their representation than concrete and other abstract concepts. Participants listed features which we coded into discrete categories and contrasted the feature distributions across conceptual types. Analyses revealed statistically significant differences in the distribution of features among the category types by condition. We also examined variability in the features generated, finding that, contrary to expectation, emotion concepts were associated with less variability. Our results reflect subtle differences between the structure of emotion concepts and the structure of, not only concrete concepts, but also other abstract concepts. We interpret these findings in the context of our sample, which was restricted to native English speakers, and discuss the importance of validating these findings across speakers of different languages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Gated weighted normative feature fusion for multispectral object detection

Gated weighted normative feature fusion for multispectral object detection

The norms of belief as the norms of commitment: A case for pluralism

AbstractMuch of the discussion on the normativity of belief rests on the presupposition that there is a single fundamental truth norm governing belief that explains all of its normative features. Building on the committive conception of belief proposed by some normativists, this article takes issue with this presupposition. In particular, it is argued that belief, construed as cognitive commitment, is governed by three fundamental‐cum‐irreducible norms, which I call the “entitlement norm,” the “fulfillment norm” and the “escapability norm,” and it is shown that each of them concerns a particular normative feature of belief. Taken together, these norms can explain all the normative features of belief without leading to implausible consequences. The discussion also shows that the relationship between the truth norm and the evidence norm is more complicated than is usually conceded by normativists.

Fittingness first?: Reasons to withhold belief

Recent years have seen the rise of fittingness-first views, which take fittingness to be the most basic normative feature, in terms of which other normative features can be explained. This paper poses a serious difficulty for the fittingness-first approach by showing that existing fittingness-first accounts cannot plausibly accommodate an important class of reasons: reasons not to believe a proposition. There are two kinds of reasons not to believe a proposition: considerations that are counterevidence; and considerations that count against believing the proposition without indicating that it is false. I will argue that the fittingness-first accounts have trouble accommodating reasons of the latter kind.

Associations of sexting with dating partners with adolescents’ romantic relationship behaviors and attitudes

Although most sexting among adolescents occurs in the context of romantic relationships, researchers have not fully investigated how relationships involving sexting differ from those that do not. This study assessed how individual and relationship characteristics differ by whether adolescent dating partners sext (N = 269). Adolescents in sexting relationships were more likely to report sexual intercourse with their dating partner compared to those who did not sext, scored lower on measures of self-reported relationship competency, and were in relationships characterized by more abusive behaviors and verbal conflict, as well as less positive support. Boys who sexted their dating partners reported less positive intimacy in their relationships than girls who sexted. Adolescents in relationships where one partner sent more sexts than the other did not report more negative relationship behaviors relative to non-sexters and those who sent equal numbers of sexts. Lastly, relationships with and without sexting did not differ on whether they had broken up six months later. Results suggest that sexting may be a characteristic of lower-quality adolescent romantic relationships, but more information about the sexting context is needed. Implications for understanding sexting as both a normative feature of adolescent romantic relationships and as a risky sexual behavior are discussed.

Legal definition of tax: current issues

In this article, the author analyzes secured in paragraph 1 of Art. 8 of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation definition of the concept of "tax". The author notes that, taking into account the current level of development of legal science, the value of a particular normative feature of a tax is in itself doubtful, or the feature suggests so many exceptions that the rule is not visible behind them. It is also noted that the legislator himself does not seek to adhere to the legal definition when establishing new public burdens and while improving already established ones.

Technology Use in Young Adult Marital Relationships: A Case Study Approach

Contemporary young adults (18–29 years old) have experienced technology as a normative feature throughout their lives. The current case study was designed to understand how technology is used in young adult marital relationships and how these couples perceive that technology influences their relationships. Ten heterosexual young adult married couples (n = 20 individuals) completed daily diary surveys about their own and their partners technology use over seven consecutive days and each participant completed an individual in-depth interview. Results indicated no significant differences between spouses in time spent with technology (i.e., cell phones, computer/tablet, entertainment media, social networking sites). Couples indicated that technology facilitated both connection and distraction in their relationships. Further, all couples reported that they had rules for regulating technology use within their marriages.

Catirina entre desencanto e emancipação: Uma leitura filosófico-social do “Mais IDH”

A filosofia social se propõe a explicitar o social (Das Soziale) inserido nas múltiplas formas de vida e compreendido como condição constitutiva para se entender a liberdade e a individualidade. Nesse sentido, a filosofia social questiona não apenas a legitimidade das instituições sociopolíticas mas também a justificação de nossas ações e, sobretudo, das estruturas das instituições e práticas sociais orientadas à emancipação. Pretendemos explicitar em que sentido o programa social “Mais IDH” pode ser concebido como uma forma de vida social emancipatória que está inserida numa expressão normativa do social cuja orientação à práxis se fundamenta na efetividade social enquanto condições mínimas de existência social.

Influence of visual design of pedagogical presentations on the quality of educational process

The article is devoted to the actual problem of the use of pedagogical electronic presentations in the educational process. In the article, based on the analysis of scientific and methodological literature and network sources, the results of the insights on the importance of the visual design of the pedagogical electronic presentation and the main approaches used in the process of forming a visual series of educational materials for achieving the best understanding of the educational material by the audience are considered. The use of electronic presentations has become a widespread phenomenon in higher education and is part of the expectations and perceptions of both teachers and students about how the learning process should be organized. The chalk and board in the learning process quickly gave way to presentations, the growing culture of which in the educational process has become the normative feature of academic study. The use of presentations in the learning process has several advantages, namely helping to focus on the content of the subject while studying, but there are also disadvantages of their use, both in terms of using the teacher and in the aspect of student learning. Therefore, in order to maximize the effectiveness of using an electronic educational presentation, an educator needs to know and use the principles of visual design to achieve a high level of memorable learning material for students.

The Normative Significance of Forgiveness

ABSTRACTP.F. Strawson claimed that forgiveness is such an essential part of our moral practices that we could not extricate it from our form of life even if we so desired. But what is it about forgiveness that would make it such a central feature of our moral experience? In this paper, I suggest that the answer has to do with what I will call the normative significance of forgiveness. Forgiveness is normatively significant in the sense that, in its paradigmatic instances, forgiving alters the operative norms bearing on the interaction between the victim and the wrongdoer in certain characteristic ways. My project here is, first, to clarify the ways that paradigmatic cases of forgiveness alter the norms of interaction between victim and wrongdoer and to argue that it is in this respect that forgiveness is a normatively significant feature of our moral responsibility practices. Second, I show that most extant theories of forgiveness fail to explain the characteristic ways in which forgiving alters norms. Third, I offer a theory of forgiveness that accounts for this significant normative feature. I conclude by addressing two objections to my proposal.

What's in “the gap”? A glance down the central concept of picturebook theory

This article proposes a metacritical analysis of the concept of the “readerly gap” in picturebooks, as theorised by scholars of picturebook research—whether theoretical or empirical. In contemporary picturebook research, gaps are both a descriptive and a normative feature of picturebooks: they both define this type of literature and are seen as guarantees of its aesthetic quality and sophistication. They are also a crucial aspect of studies of young reader’s responses to picturebooks, many of which are concerned with how children manage to navigate and “fill” gaps in iconotexts. Readerly gaps are perceived, it seems, as spaces belonging mostly to the reader, somewhat outside of the picturebook; in particular, they are seen as at least mostly protected from adult influence. I argue that the concept of the readerly gap is an interestingly paradoxical creation of adult scholars. Both empirical research on children reading picturebooks and theoretical picturebook studies reinforce the assumption that children are better “gap-fillers” than adults and that they can on occasion become teachers to adults as to how to interpret picturebooks. This optimistically child-centred epistemology stands in stark contrast to contemporary theoretical approaches to children’s literature, which insists on the aetonormative quality of such texts. However, the readerly gap, which I prefer to call a didactic gap, remains a space surrounded with and controlled by an adult injunction. It is beyond the picturebook, beyond even the experience of reading and of exploring children’s experiences of reading, that the fundamental indeterminacy of the picturebook gap can be truly said to dwell. Keywords: picturebook theory; metacriticism; empirical research; children’s responses; didactic (Published: 23 January 2015) Citation : Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics, Vol. 6, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/blft.v6.26969

Feminism, Vegetarianism, and Colonial Resistance in Eighteenth-Century British Novels

Contrary to accepted belief, a discourse replete with religious, medical, and moral arguments emerged during the eighteenth century. Moreover, anti-meat utterances, whenever they occurred, were often politically charged--shot through with questions regarding the status of women, animals, and Hindoos (Regan 15). Until recently, most histories of vegetarianism paid little attention to the eighteenth century, making only passing reference to it and reserving rigorous explication of the discourse for the mid-nineteenth century and later. A few anthologies, however, went a step further and assembled canonical eighteenth-century statements on the issue but stopped short of treating them as literary phenomena. (1) This belated attention to the proto-vegetarianism of the eighteenth century is not surprising given that the word vegetarian was not coined until 1847, and vegetarianism did not find its institutional expression until 1849 with the founding of Great Britain's Vegetarian Society. (2) Figuring prominently into this proto-vegetarian discourse are British perceptions of India. In eighteenth-century writings on India, the vegetarianism of the Hindus was at first considered a curiosity and later as evidence of racial inferiority. The English had associated their own hearty consumption of beef with military superiority. (3) But now (as we shall see in the writings of Dow, Orme, Falconer, and others) they were associating beef-eating with superiority over not just military rivals but colonial subjects like the East Indians, who were, according to William Smellie's 1791 Philosophy of Natural History, a meager, sick, and feeble race due to their diet (144). A vegetable diet, it was thought, contributed to weakness, indolence, and military ineptitude and, consequently, races like the East Indians were destined for subordination. But such politicized colonial discourse soon gave rise to its obverse. Female novelists like Phebe Gibbes in Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Eliza Hamilton in Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) opposed the denigration of the other by contributing to an incipient feminist-vegetarian discourse (a discourse more explicit in the essays of contemporaries like Catharine Macaulay and Mary Hays). Both created a voice of female-centered authority in the literature of romantic orientalism, a voice of authority from which to critique the imperial project. They inevitably noticed an important fact about India that makes it unique among the world's cultures: vegetarianism was a normative feature of the culture. Critics have been divided over whether these novels support or criticize the imperialist project and over the extent to which they critique structures of class, race, and gender in Great Britain. One thing is certain--both defend the colonial administration of Warren Hastings and the East India Company. Mona Narain finds in Hamilton's novel such strong support for a paternalistic vision of a benevolent English empire that any critique of patriarchy is compromised (598). Claire Grogan, on the other hand, asserts that Hamilton's critique of patriarchy is alive and well, as evidenced by her creation of an alternative female discourse of the East--one that contributes to and contests the field of Orientalism (29). Gibbes, too, explores a new discursive space in her creation of Sophia Goldbourne, a voice of moral authority on the East who speaks the language of sensibility. In what follows, I first establish how the imperial discourse surrounding vegetarianism reflects a gendered language of emasculation. Next, I examine Hamilton's and Gibbe's novels as critical responses. Such responses, when read through a feminist viewpoint, can be understood as contributing to the emergence of a modern, politically self-conscious discourse. These novels, through their encounter with the other, express sensitivity to the parallel oppression of women and animals in a patriarchal culture. …

What ever happened to the "cool" kids? Long-term sequelae of early adolescent pseudomature behavior.

Pseudomature behavior-ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement-is widely viewed as a nearly normative feature of adolescence. When such behavior occurs early in adolescence, however, it was hypothesized to reflect a misguided overemphasis upon impressing peers and was considered likely to predict long-term adjustment problems. In a multimethod, multireporter study following a community sample of 184 adolescents from ages 13 to 23, early adolescent pseudomature behavior was linked cross-sectionally to a heightened desire for peer popularity and to short-term success with peers. Longitudinal results, however, supported the study's central hypothesis: Early adolescent pseudomature behavior predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use, and elevated levels of criminal behavior.

Recent Work on the Meaning of Life and Philosophy of Religion

Abstract‘The Meaning of Life’ and ‘The Philosophy of Religion’ have meant different things to different people, and so I do well to alert my reader to what these phrases mean to me and thus to the subject area of this review of recent work on their intersection. First, ‘The Meaning of Life’: within the analytic tradition, an idea has gained widespread assent; whatever the vague and enigmatic nature of the phrase ‘the meaning of life’, we may sensibly speak of meaningfulness in a life as a particular, positive, normative feature that some individuals’ lives may well have, and this feature is to be distinguished from, though closely related to, other positive features – satisfaction, wellbeing, virtue and so forth. There has been much work done on these assumptions in recent years. An excellent summary of this work up to its date of publication is given by Thaddeus Metz (in his 2007 a). Many – though by no means all – philosophers retain an instinctive scepticism toward the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ and a reluctance to engage with it, for it seems to connote vague and/or impossible‐to‐fulfil cosmic expectations. (See Thomson , chapter 11 and Seachris 2009 for attempts to engage with it nonetheless.) But philosophers are not generally now so sceptical about talk of meaningfulness in life and thus not so sceptical about the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ if it is taken to be referring merely to this. And that is how I shall be taking it. Secondly, ‘The Philosophy of Religion’: in the analytic tradition, this has usually been taken to be philosophical reflection on the rational acceptability or otherwise of classical theism and on what God's existence, should He exist, entails ontologically, metaphysically, metaethically and so forth. Therefore, I shall be talking about recent reflection in the analytic tradition on the relationship between the God of classical theism's existence (or lack of it) and meaningfulness (or lack of it) in human lives.

The argument of Explaining the Normative

The term “normativity” is ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy. It is a term that purports to explain. What it explains are facts of an apparently ubiquitous kind, namely correctness, social institutions, rationality, and much more —semantics, scientific truth, and ethics. But there is a problem with these “explanations.” These facts, sometimes under different descriptions, have already been explained by social scientists, especially some of the classical sociologists and anthropologists, in terms that do not appeal to “normativity.” In other cases, there are rivalries: one can give a normative account of scientific truth, and a sociological and historical one which does not appeal to normativity. These are issues with first-order explanations. But there is also a question about second-order matters: can we even provide explanations without appealing to normative notions such as correctness, as they apply to the explanations themselves? And if not, normativity is indispensable, at least to our metaphysics. So what is normativity? The concept appears in so many contexts that it is difficult to explain except by analogy to paradigm cases. It is the property that makes something correct, that makes an inference valid, or makes a reason rational. The classical case is the law: what makes a law binding? The normative property of bindingness, without which law would not be law, that is to say it would not possess a property we normally associate with law and even define law in terms of. The problem with this claim is simple: nothing that actually happens in the world of social action or behavior seems to require that this property actually exists. What is required to explain what people such as judges and policemen do is that they believe the law is binding. Normativism, however, rejects this, and makes the claim that belief is not enough: the law is really binding and to explain real bindingness requires that we appeal to a special set of facts or entities which can explain this special normative feature of the law. There is an apparent circularity in normativist explanations and descriptions: you have to describe the fact in a certain way to necessitate the normativist explanation. But normativists typically claim that their descriptions are the only correct ones, or that they are part of the normal world of belief and thus provide the material that needs explaining. And they can also argue that the social scientist who tries to explain the same material non-normatively necessarily uses normative language and therefore implicitly accepts normativism. The anti-normativst replies that his language is used in a non-normative way, and thus does not have the normative implications the normativist says its does. Claims about normativity turn out to have a more or less standard form, and a more or less standard conflict with alternative explanations. Something is described in a par-

Mecanismos de compensación complementarios al ajuste de riesgo prospectivo en el SGSSS en Colombia y la Cuenta de Alto Costo

Using the theory of optimal contracts in the presence of asymmetric information, this article rationalizes expost compensation mechanisms in competitive health insurance systems. I discuss the Colombian case exemplified by the Cuenta de Alto Costo (CAA). The main message is that, while a mechanism similar to the CAA is indeed needed, the current redistribution mechanism can be improved since it is unbalanced, a fundamental normative feature of any ex post redistribution of resources. Therefore, we propose an optimal redistribution mechanism based on Barros (2003), with the same informational requirements, in line with the basic objective of reducing incentives for risk selection and balanced. Additionally, since none of the above mechanisms aims to reward or punish the proper management of the disease for which redistribution takes place (currently only renal chronic disease) we further proposes a mechanism that, while maintaining the fundamental requirement of being balanced, partially controls for the proper management of the disease. The article concludes with a suggestion for further research on how to make an ex post redistribution in perfect harmony with the current exante risk adjustment mechanism.

“My Room! Private! Keep Out! This Means You!”: A Brief Overview of the Emergence of the Autonomous Teen Bedroom in Post–World War II America

This article offers a brief explanation as to why the autonomous teen bedroom became a normative feature of family life in the United States during the years following World War Two. An exclusive space that was largely restricted to middle-class, urban-dwelling girls during the Victorian era and interwar years, the teen bedroom underwent a process of democratization during the postwar years, as demographic/economic trends, shifting views on child-rearing, and the flowering of a consumer-oriented teen culture helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of the teen bedroom ideal among boys and girls from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Particular attention is paid to shifts in family size, income, and home size; the roles played by American youth and various business interests in turning the teen bedroom into a favored site of leisure and consumption; and the growing importance of child development theory and popular child-rearing advice in positioning the teen bedroom as an important tool in the maturation process.

The “New Normal”? Reflections on the Shifting Politics of the Immigration Debate

AbstractThe intensity of the recent debate over the presence of an estimated eleven to twelve million unauthorized persons in the United States often creates the impression that the current situation somehow represents a historical anomaly in the long-running debate over US immigration policy and citizenship law. This brief commentary contests that view, suggesting instead that the mass circulation and permanent presence of unauthorized persons has been a normative feature of US economic activity for more than a century and that the exigencies of global economic competition make it likely that this state of affairs will persist into the foreseeable future.

<i>Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 Simon Morgan Wortham Jeffrey T. Nealon. Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. 152 pp. In this concise yet highly charged volume, Nealon challenges the now influential perception of Foucault as a thinker who in mid-career found himself at a theoretical dead-end, having construed power in too totalizing a fashion, so that in the last analysis each variety of agency and resistance always becomes recuperable as already a function or condition of power itself. Thus, so the story goes, the research program of his middle period was jettisoned by and large by Foucault in favor of an aesthetics of subjectivity which, in emphasising the artistic self-creation of the individual through a reexamination of classical origins, offered possibilities of resistance that required something of a theoretical retreat, in that they entailed a less hostile critical engagement with Enlightenment and humanist traditions of ethics, agency, and selfhood. For Nealon, this very same narrative about Foucault’s “career,” with its neo-Hegelian understanding of change as development, correction, or progress, remains inimical to the tenor and tenets of Foucaultian thought. Moreover, Nealon worries that, since “privatized” individual self-creativity has become a wholly normative feature and discursive effect of neoliberal consumer capitalism, such a Foucault offers little critical force in the present, whereas the reevaluation of his thinking of power—far from remaining rooted in a now nearly obsolete history of the state—may help equip us to rethink global (panoptico-bio) politics and resistance today. Nealon therefore argues for a notion of intensification as a better way to track the movement through Foucault’s research career from one project to the next (he claims that it is power that always sets the Foucaultian itinerary), and indeed to elaborate the very logic and practice of power as it mutates from the historical form of sovereignty through social and disciplinary epochs to the biopolitical forms of power we now endure. Nealon places the accent on a conception of intensity which keeps its distance somewhat from a subject-centered discourse of affect, bodily sensation, or aesthetic experience. Intensity instead names power’s desire to penetrate the entire field with maximal efficiency (or, to put it another way, least expenditure/cost), generating in the process tipping points at which saturation at threshold level leads to a mutation in the field of operation of power itself. Nealon argues that a detailed reading of Foucault’s texts frequently demonstrates his rich understanding of the complex interplay between emergent, dominant, and residual forms and techniques of power, giving rise to transitional moments as this logic and practice of intensification plays itself out. Such reading offers a productive challenge to those simpleminded interpretations of Foucault which argue that, in presenting us with totalized systems of power in [End Page 375] successive epochs, he provides no way to think the transition from one to the next. For Nealon, the late work on subjectivity represents not so much Foucault’s acceptance of the inescapable centrality of the human subject construed as autonomous, rational, and auto-foundational; instead, his return to the thought of Kant stresses the Enlightenment legacy which discovers the subject only in relation to the concept, or rather amid a host of conceptual relations or, indeed, a network of functions and practices which grant the subject’s possible form. Nealon suggests, then, that such a reading of the late Foucault allows for an intensification of the question of power that becomes all the more relevant as power itself intensifies beyond disciplinary and institutional limits (while of course still harnessing and adapting the techniques of power that, say, governmentality and institutions offer), pervading remorselessy and seemingly inexhaustibly the highly virtualized spaces of the twenty-first-century “self” or, rather, “life.” Nealon draws our attention to the undoubtedly shrewd question Foucault frequently asks of theoretical and methodological decisions—“What does it cost?” (both for oneself and others)—and suggests that such a question is well attuned to the analysis of neoliberal capitalism as desiring maximum economy in its transaction with the entire field, and indeed to a strategic (rather than heroically oppositional...

Jueces y «control de calidad» de los sistemas políticos

Este artículo trata de analizar la tesis normativa que atribuye a los jueces la función de garantía de la estabilidad de los sistemas políticos, examen que se lleva a cabo en dos planos. En primer lugar, realizo una valoración de la contribución de la regla de reconocimiento a la identidad y a la legitimidad de los sistemas jurídicos. Planteo, después, la idea de que el rasgo distintivo de la función judicial desde un punto de vista institucional y normativo no es tanto el mantenimiento de la estabilidad del orden político cuanto la garantía de los derechos, subrayando las limitaciones de la tesis analizada en este artículo en contextos de transformación del orden jurídico-político.