Procrastination,deadlines, and performance: self-control by precommitment

Procrastination is all too familiar to most people. People delay writing up their research (so we hear!), repeatedly declare they will start their diets tomorrow, or postpone until next week doing odd jobs around the house. Yet people also sometimes attempt to control their procrastination by setting deadlines for themselves. In this article, we pose three questions: (a) Are people willing to self-impose meaningful (i.e., costly) deadlines to overcome procrastination? (b) Are self-imposed deadlines effective in improving task performance? (c) When self-imposing deadlines, do people set them optimally, for maximum performance enhancement? A set of studies examined these issues experimentally, showing that the answer is "yes" to the first two questions, and "no" to the third. People have self-control problems, they recognize them, and they try to control them by self-imposing costly deadlines. These deadlines help people control procrastination, hit they are not as effective as some externally imposed deadlines in improving task performance.     

Madness versus badness: the ethical tension between the recovery movement and forensic psychiatry

The mental health recovery movement promotes patient self-determination and opposes coercive psychiatric treatment. While it has made great strides towards these ends, its rhetoric impairs its political efficacy. We illustrate how psychiatry can share recovery values and yet appear to violate them. In certain criminal proceedings, for example, forensic psychiatrists routinely argue that persons with mental illness who have committed crimes are not full moral agents. Such arguments align with the recovery movement’s aim of providing appropriate treatment and services for people with severe mental illness, but contradict its fundamental principle of self-determination. We suggest that this contradiction should be addressed with some urgency, and we recommend a multidisciplinary collaborative effort involving ethics, law, psychiatry, and social policy to address this and other ethical questions that arise as the United States strives to implement recovery-oriented programs.     

Madness or Mental Illness? Revisiting Historians of Psychiatry

Is madness medical disease, problems in living, or social labeling of deviance? Does the word merely refer to behavior peculiar enough to be disturbing? Are the mad mad because of mental, physical, or environmental vulnerabilities? No one knows the answers to these questions because there is no scientific validation for any theory or specific causes of madness. Nonetheless, a view of madness as medical/bodily disease has been receiving concrete and rhetorical support from the government mental health bureaucracy, Big Pharma, mental health lobby groups, the organized profession of psychiatry, hundreds of thousands of providers of mental health services and countless books and articles. This article explores the role that medicalized language and its use by seven noted historians of psychiatry (Norman Dain, Albert Deutsch, Gerald Grob, Roy Porter, Charles Rosenberg, Andrew Scull, and Edward Shorter) might have played in shaping the contemporary view of madness as mental illness. The evidence we uncover suggests that historical “facts” about madness, much as psychiatric “facts” supporting the disease model, are shaped by belief, bias, error or ambiguous rhetoric rather than the facts of the matter.     

Ethical issues in record keeping in group psychotherapy

This article discusses numerous ethical issues regarding the keeping of records in group psychotherapy, those activities that have to do with the creating, retaining, storing, releasing, and disposing of them. A central dilemma for the group therapist is whether to keep records separately for each individual group member or to keep one record for the group as a whole. Confidentiality of records, patient access, and release of information tend to be more complex issues for group psychotherapists than for individual psychotherapists. Although notes written about the entire group may capture important themes, such notes can compromise the privacy and confidentiality of individual group members. An individual record for each patient is recommended.     

A Process Analysis of “Transient” Therapy Groups

Abstract

This article discusses numerous ethical issues regarding the keeping of records in group psychotherapy, those activities that have to do with the creating, retaining, storing, releasing, and disposing of them. A central dilemma for the group therapist is whether to keep records separately for each individual group member or to keep one record for the group as a whole. Confidentiality of records, patient access, and release of information tend to be more complex issues for group psychotherapists than for individual psychotherapists. Although notes written about the entire group may capture important themes, such notes can compromise the privacy and confidentiality of individual group members. An individual record for each patient is recommended.     

Deontic reasoning reviewed: psychological questions,empirical findings,and current theories

Deontic reasoning is concerned with questions of whether actions are forbidden or allowed, obligatory or not obligatory. This article reviews empirical findings and psychological theories on deontic reasoning with regard to three questions that have guided psychological research during the last decades: How do people’s deontic capabilities develop? How well do people perform in deontic reasoning tasks? And how do they represent deontic rules? In conclusion, it is discussed why deontic reasoning—despite astonishing, early developing competencies—is still a complex cognitive activity.     

Privacy,autonomy, and public policy: French and North American perspectives

This article raises the question of whether in both the United States and in France, an individual’s autonomy and private decision-making right(s) in matters of health care and access to reproductive technologies can be conciliated with the general interest, and more specifically, the role of the State. Can a full-fledged right to privacy, the ability to exercise one’s autonomy, exist alongside the general interest, and depend neither on financial resources like in the United States nor on centralised government decisions or the medical hierarchy like in France? The contrast between these two modern democracies justify the importance of comparing them. I will demonstrate that overlaps do exist: the free exercise of religion and opinion, freedom of expression, the inherent value of each individual. What differs, however, are the institutions and how they provide, protect, promote, or frame access to and expressions of these democratic principles. The impact of the global economy, the exposure of people around the world to each other via the internet, and the mirror effects of social media, blogs, and other such forums, have created new perspectives that countries project onto one another. For example, does France now seem to tout ‘autonomy’ as a new and important value because it appears to be an ‘American success story’? Does the United States now seem to value human rights and a social-democratic approach because of the ‘French model’? There seems to be some truth behind these assertions, but as this article will demonstrate, the portrayals of what the ‘right to privacy’ is in the United States and what ‘socialised medicine’ is in France are not necessarily fully accurate.     

(Inadvertently) Instructing Missionaries in (Public University) World Religions Courses: Examining a Pedagogical Dilemma,its Dimensions,and a Course Section Solution

In this article, I explore an ethical and pedagogical dilemma that I encounter each semester in my world religions courses: namely, that a great number of students enroll in the courses as part of their missionary training programs, and come to class understanding successful learning to mean gathering enough information about the world's religious “traditions” so as to effectively seduce people out of them. How should we teach world religions – in public university religious studies courses – with this student constituency? What are/ought to be our student learning goals? What can and should we expect to accomplish? How can we maximize student learning, while also maintaining our disciplinary integrity? In response to these questions, I propose a world religions course module, the goal of which is for students to examine – as objects of inquiry – the lenses through which they understand religion(s). With a recognition of their own lenses, I argue, missionary students become more aware of the biases and presumptions about others that they bring to the table, and they learn to see the ways in which these presumptions inform what they see and know about others, and also what they do not so easily see.     

从婚检看隐私权与知情权的冲突与协调

医生为当事人进行婚检,当发现其中一方患有性病等疾病时,告知是否会涉及到隐私权与知情权的问题,就隐私权与知情权的冲突与协调问题进行了探讨.     

Sexual Motives: Cultural,Evolutionary, and Social Psychological Perspectives

Recently, scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to investigate passionate love, sexual desire, and sexual behavior. Specifically, they have started to ask such questions as: “Why do young men and women engage in sexual liaisons?” “Why do they avoid such encounters?” Unfortunately, in attempting to answer such questions, scholars have generally focused on surveys and experiments within their own disciplines and have accorded scant attention to the discoveries of other disciplines. In this paper, we will begin by discussing three theoretical perspectives that have had the most to say about why young people seek out (or avoid) sex—cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology (where theorists often take a biopsychosocial approach). Then, we will (1) describe the many scales that have been used to assess sexual motives, and (2) review the multidisciplinary data which has been assembled in an attempt to answer the questions as to why people seek out (or avoid) sexual activity. Unfortunately, almost all this research was conducted by Western researchers, investigating the attitudes and behavior of young American men and women, who were heterosexual. (Alas, the wider-ranging data one would wish to consider is as yet only rarely available.) Through this multi-disciplinary synthesis, we hope to demonstrate the impact of culture, social experience, and biological imperatives in shaping young men’s and women’s motives for engaging in sexual encounters and provide a sort of “encyclopedia” of sexual motives measures and research for future scholars.     

A critical engagement with the DSM-5 and psychiatric diagnosis

Classifications in psychiatry can result in the reification of hypothetical approaches, arbitrary categorisation and social injustice. This article applies a social constructivist approach to critique the DSM-5 as a neurobiological model of psychiatric diagnosis which ignores psychosocial factors such as poverty, unemployment and trauma as causes of mental distress. It challenges the universality of psychiatric diagnosis and proposes that cultural psychiatry's framing of ‘culture-bound syndromes,’ or ‘cultural case formulation’ guidelines, is oversimplified. Use of the DSM in the South African context risks perpetuating injustice by labelling and stigmatising people who have in the past been racially stigmatised by apartheid. In culturally diverse South Africa, psychiatric diagnosis should take into account alternative explanatory models that provide a more balanced view of the complex and dynamic relationship between biological and sociocultural forces in the manifestation of psychopathology.     

Patients' desire to participate in decision-making in psychiatry: a questionnaire survey in Japan

Japanese national sentiment has been described as paternalistic, which has potentially wide-ranging implications for the manner in which psychiatric patients should participate in medical decision-making. To examine the extent and possible determinants of the desire to participate in medical decision-making among Japanese people, we distributed a packet of questionnaires to 747 (nonmedical) university students and 114 of their parents. The questionnaires included an imaginary case vignette of psychotic depression. The participants were asked whether they would want various types of medical information, i.e., diagnosis, aetiology, treatment, outcomes, medical charts, etc., disclosed to them were they in such a psychiatric condition. Also included was the 1995 Scale for Independent and Interdependent Construal of the Self by Kiuchi. More than half of the participants wanted all the types of medical information disclosed to them. Those participants who wanted to have all types of information disclosed to them (n = 413) as compared to those who did not want to know at least one type of information (n = 445), tended to be male and to have an educational background in psychiatry (9.7% vs 5.4%) as well as an assertive attitude as indicated by a higher score on Independence on the Scale for Independence and Interdependent Construal of the Self. These results suggest that the Japanese in this sample are more likely to want to make an autonomous contribution to the psychiatric decision-making process and that less desire for information can be predicted by some demographic and personality factors.     

Concepts of bounded agency in education,work, and the personal lives of young adults

This paper traces the development of a series of Anglo‐German studies on how young adults experience control and exercise personal agency as they pass through periods of transition in education and training, work, unemployment, and in their personal lives. The overarching aim has been to develop an extended dialogue between ideas and evidence to explore the beliefs and actions associated with life‐chances under differing structural and cultural conditions. What kinds of beliefs and perspectives do people have on their future possibilities? How far do they feel in control of their lives? How does people's belief in what is possible for them (their personal horizons developed within cultural and structural influences) determine their behaviours and what they perceive to be “choices”? This research contributes to the re‐conceptualization of agency as a process in which past habits and routines are contextualized and future possibilities envisaged in the contingencies of the present moment. The paper concludes by explaining the concept of “bounded agency” as an alternative to “structured individualization” as a way of understanding the experiences of people in changing social landscapes.     

Meta-insight: do people really know how others see them?

Although people can accurately guess how others see them, many studies have suggested that this may only be because people generally assume that others see them as they see themselves. These findings raise the question: In their everyday lives, do people understand the distinction between how they see their own personality and how others see their personality? We examined whether people make this distinction, or whether people possess what we call meta-insight. In 3 studies, we assessed meta-insight for a broad range of traits (e.g., Big Five, intelligent, funny) across several naturalistic social contexts (e.g., first impression, friends). Our findings suggest that people can make valid distinctions between how they see themselves and how others see them. Thus, people seem to have some genuine insight into their reputation and do not achieve meta-accuracy only by capitalizing on the fact that others see them similarly to how they see themselves.     

Gewalttaten psychisch Kranker

Only a minority of mentally ill persons become conspicuous due to acts of violence. Nevertheless, from time immemorial there has been a certain fear of the alleged unpredictability of the mentally ill, particularly of people who suffer from a psychosis. The creation of psychiatry as an independent medical discipline was designed from the very beginning to separate people deemed to be dangerous from society and to detain them in institutions in order to heal them, to make relevant improvements or to keep them indefinitely. The movement of dehospitalization since the 1970s, which in turn was a consequence of revolutionization of treatment options through modern neuroleptic and antidepressive drugs, led to a distinctive separation between general psychiatry and forensic psychiatry, institutionally (general psychiatric institutions with periods of hospitalization of a few weeks and psychiatric forensic committment lasting many years) as well as increasingly more in scientific discourses; however, a close cooperation is necessary for healthcare treatment, which meets the requirements of patients and also public security. In this respect general psychiatry must still undertake substantial safety reponsibilities, which it can learn from forensic psychiatry, whereas forensic committment must rapidly acquire the therapy experience of general psychiatry.     

Last rights: the ethics of research on the dead

People often have strong views about being the subjects of research after their deaths. Should these views be given any weight and, if so, how much? How could we find out what the views are and what should we do if we cannot? This paper defends the idea of posthumous interests and discusses the significance of those interests for research ethics. It argues that we can be guided by a symmetry between the interests of living and dead people and uses posthumous privacy as an example. It also claims that the weight of those interests might not decline even over long periods of time. The arguments have important implications for the ethics of (amongst others) biomedical, archaeological, anthropological, historical, and sociological research.     

Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad

Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral. We review research on this moral self-licensing effect in the domains of political correctness, prosocial behavior, and consumer choice. We also discuss remaining theoretical tensions in the literature: Do good deeds reframe bad deeds (moral credentials) or merely balance them out (moral credits)? When does past behavior liberate and when does it constrain? Is self-licensing primarily for others’ benefit (self-presentational) or is it also a way for people to reassure themselves that they are moral people? Finally, we propose avenues for future research that could begin to address these unanswered questions.     

Two Texts,Three Readers: Distance and Expertise in Reading History

Historians are extraordinary, rather than typical, readers who routinely engage in the self-conscious, directed reading and rereading of historical documents, moving iteratively between documents and their own historical theories about an issue. This study was designed to compare the reading practices of historians reading highly familiar privileged texts with those reading familial but unfamiliar texts, and to determine when and how historians use general historical knowledge versus topic-specific expertise. Two expert historians were asked to select a document critical to their current work and then to read and interpret their own document (close) and a colleague's selection (far). A third historian read the two unfamiliar texts as a control. Our expectations were confirmed: (a) Historians have general document-reading knowledge that includes schemas for identification and interpretation, (b) historians' general knowledge dynamically interacts with their topic-specific expertise, (c) historians read familiar and unfamiliar documents differently, and (d) historians read intertextually. We found evidence that identification is supported by action systems for classification, corroboration, sourcing, and contextualization and that interpretations is supported by action systems for a textual and a historical read. We also saw that historians have strategies for reading a document as text, as artifact, and as member of a set of related texts. Although historians, like all readers, construct textbase and situation models as they read, the manner in which they do so reveals the nature and extent of their expertise. Our task analysis provides an exemplar to contemplate: evidence of how historians actually know and do what we hope students may come to know and do. We conclude with recommendations for how history teachers may engage students in two particularly promising activities: reading across multiple related documents to construct a coherent historical account and the deep analytic reading of a single critical or privileged document.     

Confidentiality: a survey in a research hospital

Despite the many justifications for protecting patient confidentiality, we recognize that confidentiality cannot be absolute. Our world of automated information and easy access and storage poses many threats to confidentiality. This paper has described a survey conducted at the NIH Clinical Center to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of clinical physicians and nurses about confidentiality of patient information. The survey findings demonstrate the need for reminders and increased awareness about confidentiality in our setting. Most of the survey respondents had a good knowledge of what was expected of them, and they believed that confidentiality was important and maintaining it was their responsibility. Of interest was that in several simulated clinical situations, there was a discrepancy between what respondents indicated they should do and what they thought they would do. The biggest discrepancies appeared in situations that involved overhearing a patient conversation on the elevator, approaching an unfamiliar person who is reading a medical record in the nurses' station, and answering a patient's inquiry about the status of another patient. The findings support the speculation that this difference may be attributed to discomfort or decreased awareness, and not necessarily to lack of knowledge. Results indicate that policies and administrative expectations should be frequently communicated and enforced, and that educational programs that address issues of confidentiality should be provided. The results of this survey have been influential in guiding educational strategies and administrative activities at the clinical center. The clinical center initiated a confidentiality awareness campaign, displaying a new poster every three months in strategic locations and distributing other tangible reminders (such as pens, magnets, and buttons) containing the same confidentiality message.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)