Plague Time: Space, Fear, and Emergency Statecraft in Early Modern Italy

Michel Foucault argued famously that early modern European governors responded to plague by quarantining entire urban populations and placing citizens under minute surveillance. For Foucault, such sixteenth- and seventeenth-century policies were the first steps towards an authoritarian paradigm that would only emerge in full in the eighteenth century. The present article argues that Foucault’s model is too abstracted to function as a tool for the historical examination of specific emergencies, and it proposes an alternative analytical framework. Addressing itself to actual events in early modern Italy, the article reveals that when plague threatened, Florentine and Bolognese health officials projected themselves into a spatio-temporal dimension in which official actions and perceptions were determined solely by the spread of contagion. This dimension, “plague time,” was not a stage on the irresistible journey towards Foucault’s “utopia of the perfectly governed city.” A contingent response to a recurrent existential menace, plague time rose and fell in response to events, and may be understood as a season.

Blocking Avoidance and Escape Responses: Relations With Clinically Relevant Behaviors

The current study aims to evaluate the possible effects of interrupting problematic clinically relevant behaviors on the percentage of these responses and of clinical improvement-related responses. Two clients were treated with Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP), alternating two conditions (ABAB). On condition A, procedures to the therapist consisted of responding to the clinical improvement responses, and to description of outside of therapeutic setting behaviors, but therapists were advised to ignore problem behaviors emitted in session. During condition B, therapists followed the same procedures, but they were oriented to block (interrupt) problematic responses emitted in session. Results suggest increase in the percentage of problem behaviors during condition B. Results are discussed, highlighting the viability of planning the contingent response the therapist emits to clinically relevant behaviors.

Climate Engineering in Global Climate Governance: Implications for Participation and Linkage

The prospect of climate engineering (CE) – also known as geoengineering, referring to modification of the global environment to partly offset climate change and impacts from elevated atmospheric greenhouse gases – poses major, disruptive challenges to international policy and governance. If full global cooperation to manage climate change is not initially achievable, adding CE to the agenda has major effects on the challenges and risks associated with alternative configurations of participation – for example, variants of partial cooperation, unilateral action, and exclusion. Although the risks of unilateral CE by small states or non-state actors have been over-stated, some powerful states may be able to pursue CE unilaterally, risking international destabilization and conflict. These risks are not limited to future CE deployment, but may also be triggered by unilateral research and development (R&D), secrecy about intentions and capabilities, or assertion of legal rights of unilateral action. They may be reduced by early cooperative steps, such as international collaboration in R&D and open sharing of information. CE presents novel opportunities for explicit bargaining linkages within a complete climate response. Four CE-mitigation linkage scenarios suggest how CE may enhance mitigation incentives, and not weaken them as commonly assumed. Such synergy appears to be challenging if CE is treated only as a contingent response to a future climate crisis, but may be more achievable if CE is used earlier and at lower intensity, either to reduce peak near-term climate disruption in parallel with a programme of deep emission cuts or to target regional climate processes linked to acute global risks.

Neural, cognitive and behavioral correlates of CBASP- effects

To test the validity of two different social cognitive mechanisms as mediators of CBASP-treatment effects, we conducted fMRI-studies ini) healthy andii) healthy compared to chronically depressed subjects.The first fMRI experiment included in these studies explored the neural representations and behavioral correlates of causal contingencies between action and response in social interaction and the regulatory effect of successful/erroneous affective response prediction on the limbic system. In the second experiment we examined the ability to infer on the affective states of another person and the correlated activation of the neural “Theory of Mind” (ToM)-Network comprising superior temporal and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices.In the first experiment we demonstrated for the first time, that the probability of an interaction partner's contingent response to an action is inversely correlated with the activation of a network of medial, ventrolateral prefrontal and inferior-parietal cortices in healthy controls. The congruence of predicted and actual responses modulated activations of amygdala (aversive responses) and ventral striatum (positive responses). The Second experiment actually replicated previous observations, that mentalizing of affective states predominantly activates anterior parts of the ToM-network.Preliminary results of the comparison between healthy and chronically depressed individuals indicate dysfunctional differentiation of social partners’ predictability in chronic depression as well as altered neural representations of contingencies. For the second experiment we found altered activation within the Theory of Mind network in the patient group.Finally we will demonstrate pre-post measurements of neural and behavioral changes in both systems of social cognition after 12 CBASP sessions.