In the article, we propose to frame organizational learning as inquiry into and resolving tensions arising from the performance of different commitments to work and its organizing. We expand learning as participation with its focus upon identity and membership to the development of work and the experiences and knowledge of its participants. The proposal is inspired by pragmatist philosophy both through its emphasis on learning as ascribing meaning to experience and its sociological version, symbolic interactionism with its emphasis on work (...) and its organizing in social arenas/worlds. We show that a pragmatist learning theory, founded on principles of non-dualistic, non-hierarchy, and a non-linear view on relations, thinking and practice aligns well with the proposed refurbished learning approach via complexity theory in this special issue. Further, we propose that Dewey’s pragmatism adds an important feature to a refurbished theory of learning in organizations by emphasizing the tensional and uncertain aspects of situations as contextual wholes that for a pragmatist learning theory constitute the analytical point of departure. (shrink)

Rooted in Assyriology with a strong interdisciplinary outlook, this book offers the first comprehensive study of ancient Mesopotamian notions of the human person, including semantic analyses of Akkadian terms for body parts and multiple ...

ZusammenfassungProduktion und Verbrauch von Nahrungsmitteln sind traditionell mit weit reichenden Ängsten verknüpft. Bezogen diese sich in vormodernen Gesellschaften vorrangig auf eine ausreichende Versorgung, sind sie in der modernen Industriegesellschaft eher auf die Qualität der Nahrungsmittel gerichtet. In diesem Zusammenhang spielten in der Nachkriegszeit Antibiotika eine zentrale Rolle. Der Aufsatz stellt die Einführung der Antibiotika in die westdeutsche Veterinärmedizin, ihre frühe Diskussion als Konservierungsmittel und ihre wachsende Rolle als Wachstumsförderer dar. Vor dem Hintergrund einer zunehmend industrialisierten, auf Maximierung ausgerichteten Produktionspolitik werden (...) die Rolle der Veterinäre, der Forschung und der wissenschaftlichen Experten sowie die Probleme der Regulierung des Antibiotikaeinsatzes in der Landwirtschaft diskutiert, die in die Entstehung eines unübersichtlichen grauen Marktes für Antibiotika und die Verlagerung ihres Einsatzes in die Therapie mündete. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird der Frage zugewandt, welche Rolle das Vertrauen und die Ängste der Verbraucher in diesem Prozess spielten. (shrink)

Background: Clinical research nurses experience unique challenges in the context of their role that can lead to conflict and moral distress. Although examined in many areas, moral distress has not been studied in clinical research nurses. Research aim: The aim of this study was to examine moral distress in clinical research nurses and the relationship between moral distress scores and demographic characteristics of clinical research nurses. Research design: This was a descriptive quantitative study to measure moral distress in clinical research (...) nurses using the Measure of Moral Distress – Healthcare Professionals (MMD-HP) administered electronically. Demographic data were also collected. Participants and research context: Registered nurses working in the clinical research nurse role ( N = 322) were recruited through use of social media, emails, digital flyers, and snowball recruitment. Data was analyzed using SPSS. Pearson’s correlation, independent t-test, and one-way ANOVA were performed to explore differences among the demographic variables. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Texas Woman’s University. A consent statement was included, and completion of the questionnaire was construed as consent. Findings/results: Analysis revealed a mean overall moral distress score of 79.58 (SD = 64.27) and median of 67, with a range of 0–354. Moral distress scores were negatively correlated with clinical research nurse age ( r = 0-.156, p < 0.05). Reliability of the MMD-HP was demonstrated with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.93. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that clinical research nurses do experience moral distress and revealed a wide range of scores. Further research is necessary to determine potential patient impact due to moral distress and to develop processes to minimize moral distress in the clinical research setting. This study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the digital recruitment methods proved effective in recruiting a wide range of clinical research nurses, both nationally and internationally. (shrink)

Authentic objects are those that have a historical link to a person, event, time, or place of some significance. The current study examines everyday beliefs about authentic objects, with three primary goals: to determine the scope of adults' evaluation of authentic objects, to examine such evaluation in two distinct cultural settings, and to determine whether a person's attachment history predicts evaluation of authentic objects. We found that college students in the UK and the USA consistently evaluate a broad range of (...) authentic items as more valuable than matched control objects, more desirable to keep, and more desirable to touch, though only non-personal authentic items were judged to be more appropriate for display in a museum. These patterns were remarkably similar across the two cultural contexts. Additionally, those who had an attachment object as a child evaluated objects more favorably, and in particular judged authentic objects to be more valuable. Altogether, these results demonstrate broad endorsement of "positive contagion" among college-educated adults. (shrink)

Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids killed more than 17,000 Americans in 2017, marking a five-fold increase since 1999. High prescribing rates of opioid analgesics have been a substantial contributor to prescription opioid misuse, dependence, overdose and heroin use. There was recognition approximately ten years ago that opioid prescribing patterns were contributing to this startling increase in negative opioid-related outcomes, and federal actions, including Medicare reimbursement reform and regulatory actions, were initiated to restrict opioid prescribing. The current manuscript is a description (...) of those actions, the effect of those actions on opioid prescribing and related patient outcomes. We also describe our proposal of methods of expanding these efforts as an important piece to further reduce opioid-related misuse, dependence, and overdose death. (shrink)

Review of Joel Faflak. Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. 333 pages; paper $29.95. ISBN 978-0-7914-7269-0.

When I was a 7 months pregnant medical student, an attending surgeon asked me to which specialty I would be applying. When I replied that I was hoping to match in general surgery, he touched my pregnant abdomen and said, “Not with that you’re not.” I am not alone. Gender bias and discrimination have been shown to negatively impact women surgeons throughout their careers and deter women from even applying in surgical fields.1 Bias against female surgical trainees leads to less (...) operative autonomy and higher dropout rates.2 3 Once faculty, women surgeons are less likely to reach leadership roles.4 Recent studies confirm the author’s assertion that implicit biases create substantial harm. The author has undertaken an important study, conducting in-depth interviews with 46 women surgeons in Australia that identifies four distinct types of bias causing cumulative harm. In all four types of biases: Workplace factors including leave policies and mentorship. Epistemic injustices, or unfair assessments of women surgeons’ credibility by patients and colleagues. Stereotyped expectations. Objectification, implicit biases were seen. While many of the broad factors impeding women in surgery are well known, the author argues that these subtler factors, including both implicit bias and epistemic injustice, have a large impact. The …. (shrink)

Conley and colleagues (2023) conduct a fascinating analysis of how influential organizations in the global governance of human genome editing debate conceptualize and perform public engagement. Whi...

Wang (_Philosophy & Technology_ 35, 2022) introduces a Foucauldian power account of algorithmic transparency. This short commentary explores when this power account is appropriate. It is first observed that the power account is a constructionist one, and that such accounts often come with both factual and evaluative claims. In an instance of Hume’s law, the evaluative claims do not follow from the factual claims, leaving open the question of how much constructionist commitment (Hacking, 1999) one should have. The concept of (...) acts in equilibrium (Nozick, 1981) is then used to explain how different individuals reading Wang can end up with different evaluative attitudes towards algorithmic transparency, despite factual agreement. The commentary concludes by situating constructionist commitment inside a larger question of how much to think of our actions, identifying conflicting arguments. (shrink)

As they age, many people are afraid that they might become a burden to their families and friends. In fact, fear of being a burden is one of the most frequently cited reasons for individuals who request physician aid in dying. Why is this fear so prevalent, and what are the issues underlying this concern? I argue that perceptions of individual autonomy, dependency, and dignity all contribute to the fear of becoming a burden. However, this fear is misplaced; common conceptions (...) of these values should be re-framed and re-examined. Practices that support a more community-centered type of autonomy can be found in dependency and dignity. This paper offers some practical examples of how to address common end-of-life situations that may cause anxiety to patients who are worried about being a burden. These practices include discussing expectations, both for care and how the relationship among the participants might change, and modeling respectful caregiving behaviors. Most difficult of all, though, includes cultural and societal attitude changes so that people recognize the good in receiving care and get used to the idea that they do not need to do anything to be valuable. (shrink)

This paper investigates the dynamic and performative construction of publics in public engagement exercises. In this investigation, we, on the one hand, analyse how public engagement settings as political machineries frame particular kinds of roles and identities for the participating publics in relation to ‘the public at large’. On the other hand, we study how the participating citizens appropriate, resist and transform these roles and identities, and how they construct themselves and the participating group in relation to wider publics. The (...) empirical basis of our argument is a discussion of four different kinds of participation events in Austria. Building on these observations we develop conclusions about the public up-take of public participation in technoscience and the role of public engagement in current techno-political cultures. (shrink)

Experimental research shows that human sentence processing uses information from different levels of linguistic analysis, for example, lexical and syntactic preferences as well as semantic plausibility. Existing computational models of human sentence processing, however, have focused primarily on lexico‐syntactic factors. Those models that do account for semantic plausibility effects lack a general model of human plausibility intuitions at the sentence level. Within a probabilistic framework, we propose a wide‐coverage model that both assigns thematic roles to verb–argument pairs and determines a (...) preferred interpretation by evaluating the plausibility of the resulting (verb, role, argument) triples. The model is trained on a corpus of role‐annotated language data. We also present a transparent integration of the semantic model with an incremental probabilistic parser. We demonstrate that both the semantic plausibility model and the combined syntax/semantics model predict judgment and reading time data from the experimental literature. (shrink)

As more decisions are made by automated algorithmic systems, the transparency of these systems has come under scrutiny. While such transparency is typically seen as beneficial, there is a also a critical, Foucauldian account of it. From this perspective, worries have recently been articulated that algorithmic transparency can be used for manipulation, as part of a disciplinary power structure. Klenk (Philosophy & Technology 36, 79, 2023) recently argued that such manipulation should not be understood as exploitation of vulnerable victims, but (...) rather as indifference to whether the information provided enhances decision-making by revealing reasons. This short commentary on Klenk uses Berlin’s (1958) two concepts of liberty to further illuminate the concept of transparency as manipulation, finding alignment between positive liberty and the critical account. (shrink)

Emotion regulation (i.e. either up- or down-regulating affective responses to emotional stimuli) has been shown to modulate long-term emotional memory formation. Further, research has demonstrated that the emotional aspects of scenes are preferentially remembered relative to neutral aspects (known as the emotional memory trade-off effect). This trade-off is often enhanced when sleep follows learning, compared to an equivalent period of time spent awake. However, the interactive effects of sleep and emotion regulation on emotional memory are poorly understood. We presented 87 (...) participants with pictures of neutral or negative objects on neutral backgrounds paired with instructions to either increase or decrease their emotional response by altering personal relevance, or to passively view the stimuli. Following a 12 h period of sleep or wakefulness, participants were tested for their memory of objects and backgrounds separately. Although we replicated the emotional memory trade-off effect, no differences in the magnitude of the trade-off effect were observed between regulation conditions. Sleep improved all aspects of memory, but it did not preferentially benefit memory for emotional components of scenes. Irrespective of a period of sleep or wake following encoding, findings suggest emotion regulation during encoding did not influence memory for emotional items at a 12-hour delay. (shrink)

Recent advances in artificial intelligence offer many beneficial prospects. However, concerns have been raised about the opacity of decisions made by these systems, some of which have turned out to be biased in various ways. This article makes a contribution to a growing body of literature on how to make systems for automated decision-making more transparent, explainable, and fair by drawing attention to and further elaborating a distinction first made by Nozick between first-level bias in the application of standards and (...) second-level bias in the choice of standards, as well as a second distinction between discrimination and arbitrariness. Applying the typology developed, a number of illuminating observations are made. First, it is observed that some reported bias in automated decision-making is first-level arbitrariness, which can be alleviated by explainability techniques. However, such techniques have only a limited potential to alleviate first-level discrimination. Second, it is argued that second-level arbitrariness is probably quite common in automated decision-making. In contrast to first-level arbitrariness, however, second-level arbitrariness is not straightforward to detect automatically. Third, the prospects for alleviating arbitrariness are discussed. It is argued that detecting and alleviating second-level arbitrariness is a profound problem because there are many contrasting and sometimes conflicting standards from which to choose, and even when we make intentional efforts to choose standards for good reasons, some second-level arbitrariness remains. (shrink)

In this essay I examine the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the post-secular state. I argue that, although their views on the relation of religion and politics converge in certain respects, a profound difference remains between their overall approaches. Their disagreement on the epistemic status of religious as opposed to secular moral reasons, and on the role religious arguments can play in the public sphere testify to a deeper schism. Thus what might at first seem like a (...) quarrel about details proves to be a fundamental philosophical divide on the issue of modernity. I conclude that Taylor’s model of post-secularism is more promising as an approach to the challenge posed by growing religious and cultural diversity, for, if understood as a version of “reiterative universalism,” it avoids both moral relativism and Eurocentrism. (shrink)

Bei Kant tauchen viele antike Autoren und Theorien auf. In dieser ersten Gesamtbearbeitung zum Thema wird gegen eine langjährige Forschungsmeinung gezeigt, dass nicht so sehr Platon und Aristoteles als vielmehr der hellenistischen Philosophie die entscheidende Rolle für sein Denken zukommt. Anhand der drei Kritiken werden Konstanzen und Umbrüche seines Antikeverständnisses herausgearbeitet und in ihren Konsequenzen für die Kantdeutung beleuchtet.

That the extraordinary narrative experiment known as theSatyriconhas regularly stimulated scholarly investigation into the relationship between status and freedom is not surprising for a work, the longest surviving section of which features an excessive dinner party at the house of alibertus. Much of the discussion has concentrated on the depiction of the dinner's host and his freedmen friends. Following the lead of F. Zeitlin and others in seeing the depiction of a ‘freedmen's milieu’ in theCena, J. Bodel argued in a (...) seminal paper published twenty years ago that theCenaopens a window onto the ‘freedman's mentality’. The last ten years or so have seen a revival of the theme, with much emphasis on the display of an open society in theCena, even a Saturnalian world-view, based on a suspension or reversal of the traditional social hierarchies, all framed by a general air of excessive liberality: whatever satirical lens theSatyricon’s author is seen to have projected onto Trimalchio and his freedmen friends,theyare understood as celebrating ‘freedom's defining difference’. In the light of such a unifying conceptualization of theCena’s motley crew, it is not surprising that scholars have come to understand the libertine assemblage as a reflection of ‘the social class of the “freedmen” in first-centurya.d.Italy’. After all, ‘class’ can be defined as ‘a number of individuals possessing common attributes’, and, with specific regard to human society, as ‘a division of society according to status’. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion concepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exemplary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses' lexical approach and Stefanowitsch's metaphorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and semantic prosody. (...) The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advantages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion concepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with information from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by revealing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying results, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contrastive studies. (shrink)

Among various changing views on sex and gender, transsexualism, theoretically as well as clinically, raises a paradoxical issue: transsexual subjects seem to confirm something that they simultaneously disclaim or, at least, destabilize with their transition. These days psychoanalysis remains rather critical towards transsexualism. Jacques Lacan has developed several theories on sex and gender, reworking them during the course of his lifetime. That is why his work includes possibilities of understanding transsexual phenomena at the level of singular solutions that he himself, (...) especially with respect to some of his earlier cases, has not been able to formulate. (shrink)

This article sheds light on the ‘European citizenship paradox’, which emerges as a result of the tensions between EU citizenship norms and member‐state practices in the context of regional disparities and social inequalities that market integration arguably deepens. I claim that a transnational, politically inclusive European citizenship would provide for public spaces where unjust practices can be submitted to a respectful but no less ruthless critical analysis, where violent impositions and infringements can be disqualified by insisting on human and European (...) citizenship rights and norms. Assessing alternative citizenship models, I argue that a purely liberal‐market, a republican or a cosmopolitan citizenship model all appear to fail to resolve this paradox, unless they include deliberative procedures based on the recognition of different collective identities. (shrink)

Modern society makes extensive use of automated algorithmic decisions, fueled by advances in artificial intelligence. However, since these systems are not perfect, questions about fairness are increasingly investigated in the literature. In particular, many authors take a Rawlsian approach to algorithmic fairness. This article aims to identify some complications with this approach: Under which circumstances can Rawls’s original position reasonably be applied to algorithmic fairness decisions? First, it is argued that there are important differences between Rawls’s original position and a (...) parallel algorithmic fairness original position with respect to risk attitudes. Second, it is argued that the application of Rawls’s original position to algorithmic fairness faces a boundary problem in defining relevant stakeholders. Third, it is observed that the definition of the least advantaged, necessary for applying the difference principle, requires some attention in the context of algorithmic fairness. Finally, it is argued that appropriate deliberation in algorithmic fairness contexts often require more knowledge about probabilities than the Rawlsian original position allows. Provided that these complications are duly considered, the thought-experiment of the Rawlsian original position can be useful in algorithmic fairness decisions. (shrink)

Zwischen 1920 und 1925 kam es nach Vorarbeiten von Jones, Abraham, Stärcke, van Ophuijsen und Alexander sowie in Abrahams Hauptwerk, dem Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido, zu einer Veränderung der psychoanalytischen Theorie, die sich vor allem auf die Stellung der Aggression bezog. Die stärkere Gewichtung der präödipalen Aggression wurde in London in erster Linie von Abrahams Analysanden James und Edward Glover durchgeführt. Ihre Arbeiten bereiteten den Boden für die Rezeption von Melanie Klein, einer weiteren Abraham-Analysandin, die ihrerseits von Alix Strachey, (...) auch sie eine Analysandin Abrahams, sowie von Ernest Jones unterstützt wurde. Klein entwickelte in der Analyse mit Kindern eine Technik, die sich bevorzugt auf die Wahrnehmung und Deutung der Aggression in der Stunde bezog. All dies, ohne dass Freud die neue Linie begrüßt hätte, was aber seit dem Erstarken der lokalen Gruppen in Berlin und London nicht mehr so stark ins Gewicht fiel. Gleichwohl blieb die Frage nach der Stellung der Aggression in der Schwebe, während sich Freud bis zuletzt für das Primat des Sexuellen aussprach und sich von den Positionen der hier erwähnten Schüler zwischen 1920 und 1925 mehrere Male ausdrücklich distanzierte. (shrink)

Before the EU General Data Protection Regulation entered into force in May 2018, we witnessed an intense struggle of actors associated with data-dependent fields of science, in particular health-related academia and biobanks striving for legal derogations for data reuse in research. These actors engaged in a similar line of argument and formed issue alliances to pool their collective power. Using descriptive coding followed by an interpretive analysis, this article investigates the argumentative repertoire of these actors and embeds the analysis in (...) ethical debates on data sharing and biobank-related data governance. We observe efforts to perform a paradigmatic shift of the discourse around the General Data Protection Regulation-implementation away from ‘protecting data’ as key concern to ‘protecting health’ of individuals and societies at large. Instead of data protection, the key risks stressed by health researchers became potential obstacles to research. In line, exchange of information with data subjects is not a key concern in the arguments of biobank-related actors and it is assumed that patients want ‘their’ data to be used. We interpret these narratives as a ‘reaction’ to potential restrictions for data reuse and in line with a broader trend towards Big Data science, as the very idea of biobanking is conceptualized around long-term use of readily prepared data. We conclude that a sustainable implementation of biobanks needs not only to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, but must proactively re-imagine its relation to citizens and data subjects in order to account for the various ways that science gets entangled with society. (shrink)

Freuds Entwurf von »Trauer und Melancholie« vom Februar 1915, der 1996 publiziert wurde, steht im Zentrum der Untersuchung. Nach einer Zusammenfassung der Thesen des Entwurfs werden Ferenczis und Abrahams Reaktionen auf den Text sowie Freuds Kommentar zu ihren Stellungnahmen dargestellt. Freuds partielle Übernahme von Ferenczis Introjektion und seine Zurückhaltung gegenüber Abrahams »Munderotik und Sadismus« werden erörtert sowie die Frage, ob und inwiefern die Einwürfe der Schüler in die Endfassung von »Trauer und Melancholie« einflossen, insbesondere Abrahams theoretischer Ansatz. Abschließend wird der (...) Begriff der narzisstischen Identifizierung, der den Kern von Freuds Verständnis der Depression bildet, mit seinen aus der gleichen Zeit stammenden Ausführungen über die »Vorstufen der Liebe« zu einem Bild der narzisstischen Beziehung zwischen Subjekt und Objekt zusammengefügt, unter Betonung der klinischen Relevanz der von Freud entwickelten Differenz zwischen der narzisstischen und libidinösen Besetzung des Objekts. (shrink)

The present study was designed to explore the performance costs of negative emotional stimuli in a vigilance task. Forty participants performed a vigilance task in two conditions: one with task-irrelevant negative-arousing pictures and one with task-irrelevant neutral pictures. In addition to performance, we measured subjective state and frontal cerebral activity with near infrared spectroscopy. Overall performance in the negative picture condition was lower than in the neutral picture condition and the negative picture condition had elevated levels of energetic arousal, tense (...) arousal and task-related thoughts. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the impact of the negative pictures on tense arousal and task-related thoughts and the impact of the negative pictures on performance . These results provide support for indirect cost models of negative emotional stimuli on target detection performance. (shrink)

This short commentary on Peters identifies the entrenchment of political positions as one additional concern related to algorithmic political bias, beyond those identified by Peters. First, it is observed that the political positions detected and predicted by algorithms are typically contingent and largely explained by “political tribalism”, as argued by Brennan. Second, following Hacking, the social construction of political identities is analyzed and it is concluded that algorithmic political bias can contribute to such identities. Third, following Nozick, it is argued (...) that purist political positions may stand in the way of the pursuit of all worthy values and goals to be pursued in the political realm and that to the extent that algorithmic political bias entrenches political positions, it also hinders this healthy “zigzag of politics”. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Vor dem Hintergrund des Bedeutungszuwachses des Sports in modernen Gesellschaften und der wiederbelebten Debatte über Sport als Bürgerrecht stellt sich die sozialisationstheoretische Frage nach der sozialen Vermittlung sportbezogener Orientierungs- und Verhaltensmuster in neuer Aktualität. Mit dieser Frage befasst sich der folgende Beitrag, wobei untersucht wird, wie die Heranwachsenden speziell in der Herkunftsfamilie als primärer Sozialisationsinstanz in den vereinsgebundenen Sport „sozial eingespurt“ werden. Auf der Grundlage des Zinneckerschen Konzepts der familialen Sozialisation wird vornehmlich ein Forschungsprogramm skizziert und Annahmen formuliert, die (...) exemplarisch anhand von empirischen Daten des Brandenburgischen Jugendsportsurveys 2002 geprüft werden. (shrink)

2. The mouth: Sexuality and metaphysics.

Our paper addresses the question of what exactly the contribution of the humanities to management education could or should be, suggesting the concept of Literacy as both this contribution’s goal and method. Though there seems to emerge a consensus in the debate about the future of management education that the humanities should be involved with shaping it, some misconceptions about the humanities obscure the understanding of the why and how of it, most notably as to the manner in which they (...) are to provide for ethical values. Our paper in a first step endeavours to clear those misconceptions up drawing on some historical aspects of their development. It then proceeds to introducing the concept of Literacy and, based on it, the teaching framework of Critical Management Literacy we designed to operationalize the concept towards management students` needs. Our leading hypothesis is that the contribution of the humanities should focus on the cultivation of the capacity for epistemological doubt in order to prepare students for the complexity and indeterminacy of reality, thus at the same time laying the groundwork for ethical reflectivity. (shrink)

Background: Recent research has demonstrated that depressed individuals show impairments in inhibiting irrelevant emotional material, and that these impairments are linked to rumination. Cognitive inhibition, however, is not a unitary construct but consists of several components which operate at different stages of information processing. The present study was designed to assess two components of inhibition and examine their relation to depression and rumination in a sample of clinically depressed and healthy control participants. Methods: Twenty-two individuals diagnosed with a current depressive (...) episode and 27 never-disordered control participants completed an Emotional Flanker Task to assess individual differences in interference control and a modification of the Working Memory Selection Task to assess individual differences in the ability to discard no longer relevant emotional material from working memory. Participants completed self-report measures to assess depressive symptoms and rumination. Results: Clinically depressed compared to control participants showed significantly reduced interference control of irrelevant negative information. The groups, however, did not differ in their ability to discard no longer relevant negative information from working memory. In contrast, rumination was associated with difficulty removing no longer relevant negative material from working memory but not with deficits in interference control. Conclusions: Results highlight the importance of differentiating among components of inhibition to gain a better understanding of cognitive mechanisms underlying depression and rumination. (shrink)