Most accounts of responsibility begin from either of two prominent points of departure: the idea that an agent must have some characterological or expressive connection to the action, or alternately, the idea that an agent must be in some sense responsive to reasons. Indeed, we might even understand much of the past couple of decades of philosophical work on moral responsibility as concerned wi...

Having a sense of self is an explicit and high-level functional specialization of the human brain. The anatomical localization of self-awareness and the brain mechanisms involved in consciousness were investigated by functional neuroimaging different emotional mental states of core consciousness in patients with Multiple Personality Disorder (i.e., Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)). We demo...

Individuals confront the continuing challenge of attending to the competing demands of internal and external stimuli. The emerging I-Self applies three principles of evaluation, categorization, and subsidiation to organize these informational demands. These principles guide the development of the five systems of personality--cognition, affect, motivation, behavior, and psychophysiology. These s...

Through computational analysis of natural language responses, this exploratory study considered problems related to the assessment of adolescent moral identity. The matched sample was composed of 15 care-exemplar and 15 comparison adolescents from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse urban neighborhoods. Participants were given a semistructured interview based on a well-known study of adole...

Krista Thomason’s Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life (Thomason, 2018), develops a novel account shame – one that advances our understanding the emotion its moral significance. O...

The accessibility of people's highest hopes and achievements can affect their reactions to upward comparisons. Three studies showed that, under normal circumstances, individuals were inspired by an outstanding role model; their motivation and self-evaluations were enhanced. However, when their most positive self-views were temporarily or chronically activated, inspiration was undermined, and in...