Cognitive expectations

To review the evidence for a systematic relationship between cancer patients' pre-treatment expectations (anticipated side effects) and subsequent experience of treatment-related side effects, and to compare this relationship in patients with no prior treatment experience (cognitive expectations) and with some prior treatment experience (conditioned response). A total of 12,952 citations were identified through a comprehensive search of the literature published on or before November 2016 and screened against inclusion criteria. Studies were eligible if they included participants undergoing curative treatment for cancer, measured a treatment side effect, examined the relationship between anticipation and experience of side effects, and reported quantitative data. Thirty-one studies were included in the review and meta-analysis (total N = 5069). The side effects examined were nausea (anticipatory and post-treatment), vomiting, fatigue, pain, problems with concentration, and skin r...

No weakening, but rather an expansion, of statehood can be observed in the contemporary world. This does not, on the other hand, imply that extensive forms of constitutional ordering do not exist outside the realm of states. Instead, the evolution of world society has been characterized by a protracted dual movement where the expansion and densification of statehood and autonomous forms of transnational ordering gradually emerged in a mutually constitutive fashion. One implication of this is that neither the concept of the state nor the concept of nonstate transnational entities is adequately capable of delineating the object of constitutional analysis. Instead, the concept of normative orders has been introduced as an overarching category capable of identifying the contexts within which constitutional ordering emerges.
Subsequently, a distinction between the internal and external dimensions of the law of normative orders has been introduced, specifying them as respectively oriented towards establishing internal condensation of a given normative order and external compatibility between different normative orders. With this background, a framework for the analysis of constitutional frameworks of normative orders is developed. The central element is a distinction among three dimensions: First, a constitution implies a coupling between a constitutional object, in the form of a hierarchical organization of a given normative order capable of reproducing an autonomous source of authority, and a concordant legal framework. Second, constitutionalization implies a coupling between an internal reconstruction of an external constitutional subject within the constitutional object, and the register of legal rights, establishing a framework for exchanges between the constitutional object and the wider world as represented by the constitutional subject. Third, constitutionalism denotes the institutionalization of a double function, in the form of a principle-based and legally fortified striving toward universal inclusion, providing a sense of direction in time through an articulated form of constitutional consciousness.
The insights developed are briefly illustrated by the case of the global Fairtrade Certification System.

States remain a central form of ordering but only one among several. In the transnational space, a wide range of autonomous public- and private-norm producing organizations and regimes operates, which is not, or only partly controlled, by states. The consequence is that the contemporary world is characterized by a multiplicity of overlapping normative orders that rely on different organizational principles: for example, some are territorially bound and some are functionally delineated. Governance structures have emerged as the form through which the multiplicity of orders is linked together. They are inter-contextual forms which simultaneously serve as buffer zones and transmission belts between these orders. As such, governance structures can be understood as institutional mechanisms that fulfill the function of ensuring the societal embeddedness of autonomous normative orders in the wider world through increased reflexivity.

The type of law which has emerged in order to structure the governance phenomenon reflects the societal function of governance structures. Transnational law is an “in between worlds” law in the sense that a central aspect of transnational law is the framing of learning processes capable of ensuring mutual adaptability between normative orders. As such transnational law fulfills a different function than nation-state law which in essence remains oriented towards the upholding of already established normative expectations. As governance structures are the no man’s land between normative orders, they possess an intrinsic political quality. They are the battlefields were the delineation of normative orders are established and continuously reaffirmed. Grasping the kind of political processes unfolding within governance structures is however conditioned by the development of a concept of the political which reflects the inter-contextual function of governance structures.