Common Sense Beliefs about the Central Self, Moral Character, and the Brain

Beliefs and strategies about urinary incontinence: a possible moderation role between symptoms and sexual function, and quality of life

Background

Urinary Incontinence (UI) has numerous repercussions in women's lives, and it is underreported/underdiagnosed.

Objective

The present study aimed to understand: (1) the differences between women with and without urine loss regarding Quality of Life (QoL) and Sexual Function (SF); (2) the possible moderation role of UI-related beliefs and strategies on the relationship between UI-symptom severity and SF and QoL, in women with UI.

Methods

Cross-sectional Design. Participants: Primary aim: Overall, 2,578 women aged 40-65 (Mage = 49.94, DPage = 6.76) were collected online. Secondary aim: 1,538 women who self-reported having urine loss occasionally/frequently (Mage = 50.19, DPage = 6.58). All data analyses were done with IBM SPSS Statistics and R statistical system 4.0 through RStudio. Statistical Path analysis was performed with the lavaan package to study the hypothetical association and moderating effects between the variables.

Results

Primary aim: women without UI had a better SF [t(2576) = 3.13, p = 0.002; 95% C.I., 0.18 to 0.80] and QoL [t(2576) = 7.71, p < 0.001; 95% C.I., 3.14 to 5.28] than their counterparts with UI. Secondary aim: UI-related coping strategies attenuated the impact of UI-symptom severity on SF(β = -0.07; p = 0.041); the more dysfunctional the UI-related beliefs were, the poorer QoL was (β = -0.06; p = 0.031); the more frequent the UI-related hiding/defensive strategies were, the poorer QoL was (β = -0.26; p < 0.001).

Discussion

Limitations: online data collection, which thwarted the clarification of participants, if needed; absence of a UI medical diagnosis (only self-reported measures were used). Strengths and practical implications: (i) the crucial role of UI-related beliefs and strategies in the QoL of women with UI; (ii) the impact that UI-concealing/defensive strategies have in attenuating the impact of UI-symptom severity on SF, which might be perceived as a short-term benefit and hence contribute to maintaining the UI condition and constitute a barrier to help-seeking, (iii) impact of UI-symptom severity on QoL and SF (including a comparison group entailing women without UI, which is scarcely used); and (iv) the use of gold-standard and psychometrically robust instruments.

Conclusion

Changing dysfunctional UI-related beliefs and strategies in clinical settings may improve the QoL; UI-concealing strategies may reinforce themselves by immediate effects on SF, but are not functional in the long term.

Bring Your Non-self to Work? The Interaction Between Self-decentralization and Moral Reasoning

Spirituality continues to exert a strong influence in people's lives both in work and beyond. However, given that spirituality is often non-formalized and personal, we continue to know little about how moral reasoning is strategized. In this paper, we examine how Buddhist leader-practitioners interpret and operationalize a process of self-decentralization based upon Buddhist emptiness theory as a form of moral reasoning. We find that Buddhist leader-practitioners share a common understanding of a self-decentralized identity and operationalize self-decentralization through two practices in Buddhist philosophy-skillful means and the middle way-to foreground social outcomes. However, we also find that practitioners face tensions and challenges in moral reasoning relates to agency-the 're-centering' of the self as an enlightened self and the use of karmic reasoning to justify (un)ethical behavior-and contextual constraints that lead to feelings of vulnerability and exclusion. We present a model that elaborates these processes and invite further research that examines novel approaches and dynamic interpretations of the self in moral reasoning.

Is the true self truly moral? Identity intuitions across domains of sociomoral reasoning and age

Adults intuit that positive moral characteristics (e.g., being caring, being honest) reflect a person's true self. The current work aimed to extend research on the true self phenomenon (a) by directly comparing how moral and nonmoral norms are implicated in intuitions about the true self and (b) by examining intuitions about the true self across various age groups (children, adolescents, and adults). Participants from three age groups were presented with scenarios describing people undergoing change and reported the impact of that change on identity. The nature of the change varied in the type of characteristic (moral belief, social-conventional belief, or personal preference), the direction (positive change or negative change), and the target (self or other). Children and adolescents, like adults, judged that changes to moral beliefs were more disruptive to identity continuity than changes to social-conventional beliefs or personal preferences. All three age groups shared the intuition that negative moral change was more disruptive to identity than positive moral change, which is consistent with an understanding of the central role that morally good characteristics play in perceptions of the true self. Although these results suggest continuity between late childhood and early adulthood in understanding of the true self, age-related differences did emerge with regard to the target of the change. Children and adolescents reported that moral changes in others were more disruptive to identity than moral changes in themselves, unlike adults, whose intuitions were perspective invariant.

A free will needs a free mind: Belief in substance dualism and reductive physicalism differentially predict belief in free will and determinism

In this article, we show that lay people's beliefs about how minds relate to bodies are more complex than past research suggests, and that treating them as a multidimensional construct helps explain inconclusive findings from the literature regarding their relation to beliefs about whether humans possess a free will. In two studies, we found that items previously used to assess a unidimensional belief in how minds relate to bodies indeed capture two distinguishable constructs (belief in substance dualism and reductive physicalism) that differently predict belief in free will and two types of determinism (Studies 1 and 2). Additionally, we found that two fundamental personality traits pertaining to people's preference for experiential versus rational information processing predict those metaphysical beliefs that were theorized to be based on subjective phenomenological experience and rational deliberation, respectively (Study 2). In sum, beliefs about mind-body relations are a multidimensional construct with unique predictive abilities.

Unable or Unwilling to Exercise Self-control? The Impact of Neuroscience on Perceptions of Impulsive Offenders

In growing numbers of court cases, neuroscience is presented to document the mental state of the offender at the level of the brain. While a small body of research has documented the effects of describing the brain state of psychotic offenders, this study tested the impact of neuroscience that could apply to far more offenders; that is the neuroscience of impulse control. In this online vignette experiment, 759 participants sentenced a normally controlled or normally impulsive actor, who committed a violent offense on impulse, explained in either cognitive or neurobiological terms. Although participants considered the neurobiological actor less responsible for his impulsive disposition than the cognitive actor, the neuroscientific testimony did not affect attributions of choice, blame, dangerousness, or punishment for the criminal act. In fact, the neuroscientific testimony exacerbated the perception that the offender offended consciously and “really wanted” to offend. The described disposition of the actor was also influential: participants attributed more capacity for reform, more free choice and consequently, more blame to the normally controlled actor. Participants also attributed this actor's offending more to his social life experiences and less to his genes and brain. However, this shift in attributions was unable to explain the greater blame directed at this offender. Together, such findings suggest that even when neuroscience changes attributions for impulsive character, attributions for impulsive offending may remain unchanged. Hence this study casts doubt on the mitigating and aggravating potential of neuroscientific testimony in court.