Neuroimaging of emotion and personality: scientific evidence and ethical considerations

Affective neuroscience has seen an explosion of research efforts using modern neuroimaging approaches to uncover the neural basis of emotion and personality. The first section of this paper reviews studies from the domains of affective and forensic neuroimaging. These studies illustrate some of the topics likely to be the subject of future ethical debates. The second section relates limitations of the neuroimaging approach to ethical considerations in predicting future psychopathology on the basis of brain state analysis.     

Sexual modification therapies: ethical controversies, philosophical disputes, and theological reflections.

Knowing, either by the light of natural reason or by the light of Christian revelation, that homosexuality is a disordered condition is not sufficient for its being ethically permissible to direct self-identified homosexual persons toward just any treatment that aims to modify sexual orientation. For example, such an undertaking would be morally impermissible in cases where the available "treatments" are known to be both futile and potentially damaging to persons undertaking them. I, therefore, introduce this edition of Christian Bioethics by reflecting on (a) the position of homosexuality in our current psychiatric nosology, (b) problems with drawing causal inferences from the outcomes of psychotherapy studies, and (c) the advantages and disadvantages of appealing to traditional categories of sexual orientation in this discussion, all with an eye toward more deeply elucidating core ethical concerns involving the intentional psychotherapeutic modification of sexual orientation.     

Neuroimaging techniques for memory detection: scientific, ethical, and legal issues

There is considerable interest in the use of neuroimaging techniques for forensic purposes. Memory detection techniques, including the well-publicized Brain Fingerprinting technique (Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, Inc., Seattle WA), exploit the fact that the brain responds differently to sensory stimuli to which it has been exposed before. When a stimulus is specifically associated with a crime, the resulting brain activity should differentiate between someone who was present at the crime and someone who was not. This article reviews the scientific literature on three such techniques: priming, old/new, and P300 effects. The forensic potential of these techniques is evaluated based on four criteria: specificity, automaticity, encoding flexibility, and longevity. This article concludes that none of the techniques are devoid of forensic potential, although much research is yet to be done. Ethical issues, including rights to privacy and against self-incrimination, are discussed. A discussion of legal issues concludes that current memory detection techniques do not yet meet United States standards of legal admissibility.     

Psychoanalytic reflections on global warming and its relation to human omnipotence and ethical responsibility

Abstract

Global warming – reality or fantasy? Certainly, global warming is a dystopia linked to other catastrophes in human history, such as the Flood and Noah's Ark. Noah's belief in God saved his life and the life of his family. In our time, we need to sustain our belief in the human capacity to cooperate and survive. This is a necessary background when thinking of the future and analysing the border between fantasy and reality, between fear and paranoia, and in the process in which a new worldview takes form.     

环境污染对人的心理效应

本文从环境心理学的角度论述了环境污染可以通过作业环境、室内环境、生态环境对人的心理行为产生影响;也可以通过遗传变异导致出生缺陷,或直接损伤身体等原因对心理和行为产生影响,并且提出了心理干预的应对措施。     

Teaching ethical analysis in environmental management decisions: A process-oriented approach

The general public and environmental policy makers often perceive management actions of environmental managers as “science,” when such actions are, in fact, value judgments about when to intervene in natural processes. The choice of action requires ethical as well as scientific analysis because managers must choose a normative outcome to direct their intervention. I examine a management case study involving prescribed burning of sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) communities in south-central Montana (USA) to illustrate how to teach students to ethically evaluate a management action by precisely identifying: 1) the proposed management action, 2) the deficiency of the system to be remedied by the action, 3) the stakeholders affected by the action, and 4) the category and type of values affirmed in the management action. Through such analysis, students are taught to recognize implicit and explicit value judgments associated with management actions, identify stakeholders to whom managers have legitimate ethical obligations, and practice a general method of ethical analysis applicable to many forms of environmental management. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting, Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, February 24–27, 2005.     

Multiple scientific paradigms in environmental psychology

The developmental-historical pattern of environmental psychology is analyzed. It is seen to reflect primarily the discovery of engaging puzzles within the man-environment context by several mature research paradigms currently viable within scientific psychology. This invasion of the paradigms is illustrated by brief accounts of: 1) ecological psychology; 2) environmental perception; 3) environmental assessment; 4) personality and the environment; 5) environmental cognition, and 6) analysis of functional adaptations. The implications of this perspective are noted for the new field's pure and applied research potential; for communication between researchers and environmental decisionmakers; for the prospects of a common conceptual framework, and for advanced research training in the field.     

Guidelines for training in the ethical conduct of scientific research

Historically, scientists in training have learned the rules of ethical conduct by the example of their advisors and other senior scientists and by practice. This paper is intended to serve as a guide for the beginning scientist to some fundamental principles of scientific research ethics. The paper focuses less on issues of outright dishonesty or fraud, and more on the positive aspects of ethical scientific behavior; in other words, what a scientist should do to maintain a high level of ethical conduct in research. There are a number of fairly specific rules, guidelines, or commonly accepted operating principles that have evolved for the ethical conduct of science. In order to discuss this code of ethics, this paper is divided into sections dealing with specific areas of scientific ethics. These areas are: data collection and storage, ownership of data, confidentiality, communication, authorship, collaboration, the peer review system, and rules of dealing with ethical complaints. Illustrative case histories are presented to provide examples of the type of ethical dispute or problem being discussed. If scientific trainees learn the accepted rules of behavior that govern the conduct of science, ethical problems that arise out of ignorance, misunderstanding, or poor communication can be avoided.     

Media representations of environmental issues: From scientific to political discourse

IntroductionThe media is considered to be a social agent that intervenes in the elaboration of social representations of environmental issues.ObjectiveThis research analyses media representations of environmental issues and how they have been constructed and transformed from the Rio Summit in 1992 to 2006. The authors adopted a constructionist approach based on the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1961/1976) to describe the generation of information by the mass media.MethodA sample of 1039 news articles from two Spanish newspapers (La Vanguardia and El País) was analysed. The period of study ranged from the Rio Earth Summit to several years after the Johannesburg Summit (1992–2006), and the study analyses both the content and form of the environmental news.ResultsThis longitudinal study shows not only an increase in environmental news during the period of analysis but also an increased variety of themes addressed and represented. The results evidence significant urban problems in recent years. The environment has shifted from being associated with nature to being predominately associated with the urban environment.ConclusionThe results suggest that there has been a movement from scientific to political discourse and a change towards greater reflection and social recognition of the relevance of environmental issues.     

空气污染的不良效应及理论模型:环境心理学的视角

空气污染的不良效应不仅限于生理健康损害,还涉及认知功能、情绪和行为等多方面的消极影响。针对空气污染不良效应的形成机制,以往研究提出了环境应激模型和社会-环境交互模型,这些理论模型强调空气污染的不良效应不仅涉及污染的直接暴露程度,也取决于个体的身心状况以及他对空气污染的主观评价。基于以往研究的不足,尤其是环境心理学介入空气污染研究的可行性,未来研究可着眼于改进空气污染的心理学研究方法,开展空气污染的环境应激和风险感知研究。     

Science versus orthodoxy: Anatomy of the congressional condemnation of a scientific article and reflections on remedies for future ideological attacks

In July 1999 the U.S. Congress passed a formal resolution condemning our article on child sexual abuse (CSA), an article in which we concluded, based on 59 meta-analytically reviewed studies using college samples, that the assumed harmfulness of CSA had been overstated (Rind, Tromovitch, & Bauserman, 1998). The condemnation followed months of attacks by social conservatives and by mental health professionals specializing either in curing homosexuality or in treating patients by inducing them to recover memories of CSA. In this article, we detail the chronology behind the attacks. Then we discuss the science behind our meta-analysis, showing that the attacks were specious and that our study employed sound science, advancing the field considerably by close attention to issues of external, internal, and construct validity, as well as precision and objectivity. Next, we discuss orthodoxies and moral panics more generally, arguing that our article was attacked as vehemently as it was because it collided with a powerful, but socially constructed orthodoxy that has evolved over the last quarter century. Finally, we offer reflections and recommendations for fellow researchers, lest this kind of event recur. We focus on the need for greater cognizance of historical attacks on science to anticipate and deflate future attacks. We argue that our research should stand as another reminder among many that sacred-cow issues do not belong in science. We discuss nonscientific advocacy in the social sciences and the need to recognize and counter it. We discuss the failure of psychology to adequately deal with the study of human sexuality, a problem that enabled the faulty attacks on our article, and we suggest directions for becoming more scientific in this area. And last, we raise the issue of how professional organizations might deal more effectively with such attacks in the future.     

Savings and fertility: ethical issues

... Population ethics is rightly regarded a difficult field of inquiry. Here I have tried to argue that the kinds of difficulty that have intrigued philosophers in recent years are insubstantial. Real difficulties lie elsewhere. They lie in deep conceptual problems actual people are faced with when they contemplate the desirable size of their family and the savings that should accompany it.     

Biotechnology and legitimacy

Contested Technology: Ethics, Risk and Public Debate, edited by Rene von Schomberg, Tilburg: International Centre for Human and Public Affairs, 1995, £19/$29 pb.     

Creating an ethical organizational environment: The relationship between ethical leadership,ethical organizational climate,and unethical behavior

The purpose of this research is to provide a richer lens on the ethical organizational environment by examining the relationship between ethical leadership and unit-level unethical behavior through ethical organizational climate (EOC), with collective moral identity as a boundary condition. In testing our theoretical model, we first develop and validate a measure of EOC to address concerns with existing measures of ethical climate. Second, we examine the role of collective moral identity as a moderator of the relationship between EOC and unit unethical behavior. We discuss implications regarding the importance of developing a more comprehensive conceptualization of EOC.