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The transition from manual to digital procurement is expected to enhance procurement officers' competency. However, many challenges still reflect low competence levels. Although 496 studies have explored digital procurement, few have addressed how procurement officials feel and what competencies they need. This qualitative study involved 12 procurement officers to explore their pain, pleasure, and competency needs. Data from structured interviews and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were transcribed and analyzed using a narrative and inductive thematic approach, consisting of four stages-from understanding participants' stories to forming themes aligned with the research objectives. The study identified three main themes: pain, pleasure, and procurement competencies. The reported problems include changing regulations, complexity, conflicts and violations, operational limitations, and various challenges. Pleasures are derived from job satisfaction and rewards, conscientious work, effectiveness, rule compliance, and positive outcomes. Procurement competencies are categorized into two sub-themes: core competencies and support competencies, with the latter being divided into firm and warm support. The limitation of this study was that the researchers only used methodological triangulation without source and investigator triangulation, suggesting the need for broader validation in future research.

The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic \"life,\" making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.

Caspar Hare makes an original and compelling case for \"egocentric presentism,\" a view about the nature of first-person experience, about what happens when we see things from our own particular point of view. A natural thought about our first-person experience is that \"all and only the things of which I am aware are present to me.\" Hare, however, goes one step further and claims, counterintuitively, that the thought should instead be that \"all and only the things of which I am aware are present.\" There is, in other words, something unique about me and the things of which I am aware.

Aristotle's moral philosophy is a pillar of Western ethical thought. It bequeathed to the world an emphasis on virtues and vices, happiness as well-being or a life well lived, and rationally motivated action as a mean between extremes. Its influence was felt well beyond antiquity into the Middle Ages, particularly through the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the past century, with the rise of virtue theory in moral philosophy, Aristotle's ethics has been revived as a source of insight and interest. While most attention has traditionally focused on Aristotle's famous Nicomachean Ethics, there are several other works written by or attributed to Aristotle that illuminate his ethics: the Eudemian Ethics, the Magna Moralia, and Virtues and Vices. This book brings together all four of these important texts, in thoroughly revised versions of the translations found in the authoritative complete works universally recognized as the standard English edition. Edited and introduced by two of the world's leading scholars of ancient philosophy, this is an essential volume for anyone interested in the ethical thought of one of the most important philosophers in the Western tradition.

Measure plays a major role in epicureanism, a thought built up on the basis of a «  canon  ». The basic affections of pleasure and pain submit to such a process, though with due respect to that which is proper to the body on the one hand and to the soul on the other, as conceptualized by epicureanism. Moreover, such measure is essentially a measure of pain, since the highest pleasure is absence of pain, and cinetic pleasure is the process through which pain is suppressed. As far as the bodily affections are concerned, their measure is the physical measure of the atomic movement producive of pain ; as to the psychic ones, they submit to a logical apprehension dealing with the truth value of one or more propositions, and as such analogous, though not identical, to what the Stoics developped as a «  conjunctive model  » according to J. Brunschwig’s analysis. The combination of both approaches objectively grants, through appropriate measure, the superiority of psychic affections over bodily ones, and thus the sage’s happiness even if racked by the worst physical pains.

Tracey and Leknes review the emerging evidence of extensive similarities between the anatomical substrates and signalling systems that mediate painful and pleasant sensations. Understanding the relationship between these powerful modulators of behaviour could be important for alleviating unnecessary suffering and improving well-being. Pain and pleasure are powerful motivators of behaviour and have historically been considered opposites. Emerging evidence from the pain and reward research fields points to extensive similarities in the anatomical substrates of painful and pleasant sensations. Recent molecular-imaging and animal studies have demonstrated the important role of the opioid and dopamine systems in modulating both pain and pleasure. Understanding the mutually inhibitory effects that pain and reward processing have on each other, and the neural mechanisms that underpin such modulation, is important for alleviating unnecessary suffering and improving well-being.

Using a mobile-phone-based experience-sampling technology in a sample of 378 individuals ranging from 14 to 86 years of age, we investigated age differences in how people want to influence their feelings in their daily lives. Contra-hedonic motivations of wanting either to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect were most prevalent in adolescence, whereas prohedonic motivations of wanting either to maintain, but not enhance, positive affect or to dampen negative affect were most prevalent in old age. This pattern was mirrored by an age-related increase in self-reported day-to-day emotional well-being. Analyses of the emotional experiences that accompanied prohedonic and contra-hedonic motivations are consistent with the notions that contra-hedonic motivations are more likely to serve utilitarian than hedonic functions, and that people are more likely to be motivated to maintain negative affect when it is accompanied by positive affect. Implications for understanding affective development are discussed.

C-tactile afferents form a distinct channel that encodes pleasant tactile stimulation. Prevailing views indicate they project, as with other unmyelinated afferents, in lamina I-spinothalamic pathways. However, we found that spinothalamic ablation in humans, whilst profoundly impairing pain, temperature and itch, had no effect on pleasant touch perception. Only discriminative touch deficits were seen. These findings preclude privileged C-tactile-lamina I-spinothalamic projections and imply integrated hedonic and discriminative spinal processing from the body.

Research on emotion regulation has focused upon observers' ability to regulate their emotional reaction to stimuli such as affective pictures, but many other aspects of our affective experience are also potentially amenable to intentional cognitive regulation. In the domain of decision-making, recent work has demonstrated a role for emotions in choice, although such work has generally remained agnostic about the specific role of emotion. Combining psychologically-derived cognitive strategies, physiological measurements of arousal, and an economic model of behavior, this study examined changes in choices (specifically, loss aversion) and physiological correlates of behavior as the result of an intentional cognitive regulation strategy. Participants were on average more aroused per dollar to losses relative to gains, as measured with skin conductance response, and the difference in arousal to losses versus gains correlated with behavioral loss aversion across subjects. These results suggest a specific role for arousal responses in loss aversion. Most importantly, the intentional cognitive regulation strategy, which emphasized \"perspective-taking,\" uniquely reduced both behavioral loss aversion and arousal to losses relative to gains, largely by influencing arousal to losses. Our results confirm previous research demonstrating loss aversion while providing new evidence characterizing individual differences and arousal correlates and illustrating the effectiveness of intentional regulation strategies in reducing loss aversion both behaviorally and physiologically.

For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of \"true womanhood.\" She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice.