This article provides a descriptive account of the evolution of the Bhutanese monarchy, and normative claims about its endurance and its nature, suggesting that the monarchy is both the expression of as well as the guardian of the country’s constitutional identity. Bhutan became a democratic constitutional monarchy by adopting the written Constitution in 2008 after a successful 100 years of hereditary monarchy. The willingness of successive monarchs to evolve based on changing times, their ability to ensure stability and continuity, and work for the benefits of the people and country guided by the principles of Buddhist kingship seem to have contributed not only in them benefitting from unqualified support of the people, but also in attaining the status of an expression of Bhutanese constitutional identity.

Earlier frameworks have indicated that older adults tend to experience decline intheir deliberative decisional capacity, while their affective abilities tend toremain intact (Peters, Hess, Västfjäll, & Auman, 2007). Thepresent study applied this framework to the study of risky decision-makingacross the lifespan. Two versions of the Columbia Card Task (CCT) were used totrigger either affective decision-making (i.e., the “warm” CCT) ordeliberative decision-making (i.e., the “cold” CCT) in a sample of158 individuals across the lifespan. Overall there were no age differences inrisk seeking. However, there was a significant interaction between age andcondition, such that older adults were relatively more risk seeking in the coldcondition only. In terms of everyday decision-making, context matters and riskpropensity may shift within older adults depending upon the context.

The current study tested the boundary conditions of ethical decision-making by increasing cognitive load. This manipulation is believed to hinder deliberation, and, as we argue, reduces the cognitive capacity needed for a self-serving bias to occur. As telling a lie is believed to be more cognitively taxing than telling the truth, we hypothesized that participants would be more honest under high cognitive load than low cognitive load. 173 participants anonymously rolled a die three times and reported their outcomes — of which one of the rolls would be paid out — while either under high or low cognitive load. For the roll that determined pay, participants under low cognitive load, but not under high cognitive load, reported die rolls that were significantly different from a uniform (honest) distribution. The reported outcome of this roll was also significantly higher in the low load condition than in the high load condition, suggesting that participants in the low load condition lied to get higher pay. This pattern was not observed for the second and third roll where participants knew the rolls were not going to be paid out and where therefore lying would not serve self-interest. Results thus indicate that having limited cognitive capacity will unveil a tendency to be honest in a situation where having more cognitive capacity would have enabled one to serve self-interest by lying.

Let A0 be a possibly unbounded positive operator on the Hilbert space H, which is boundedly invertible. Let C0 be a bounded operator from ${\cal D}\Big(A_0^{\frac{1}{2}}\Big)$ to another Hilbert space U. We prove that the system of equations $$\ddot z(t)+A_0 z(t) + {\frac{1}{2}}C_0^*C_0\dot z(t) =C_0^*u(t) $$$$y(t) =-C_0 \dot z(t)+u(t),$$ determines a well-posed linear system with input u and output y. The state of this system is $$ x(t) = \left[\begin{matrix}\, z(t) \\ \dot z(t)\end{matrix}\right] \in {\cal D}\left(A_0^{\frac{1}{2}}\right)\times H = X , $$ where X is the state space. Moreover, we have the energy identity $$ \|x(t)\|^2_X-\|x(0)\|_X^2 = \int_0^T\| u(t)\|^2_U {\rm d}t - \int_0^T \|y(t)\|_U^2 {\rm d}t. $$ We show that the system described above is isomorphic to its dual, so that a similar energy identity holds also for the dual system and hence, the system is conservative. We derive various other properties of such systems and we give a relevant example: a wave equation on a bounded n-dimensional domain with boundary control and boundary observation on part of the boundary.