Compensation for pain,suffering, and other psychological injuries: The of Daubert on employment discrimination claims

The Daubert standard for admitting expert testimony places increased emphasis on the scientific basis for professional opinions. This article identifies factors mental health professionals should consider to meet that standard and Federal Rule of Evidence 702 when evaluating claims of psychological injuries as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1991, in cases of sexual harassment, retaliation, and other forms of employment discrimination. First, the contribution experts can make by presenting a framework to assess and understand the nature, duration, intensity and severity of emotional injuries is outlined. Specialized knowledge helpful in assessing these claims is reviewed in light of the scientific literature on stressors, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and ways in which related symptoms manifest regarding events in the workplace or following loss of employment. Second, the role of qualified experts to facilitate determinations of causation is discussed, highlighting factors that bear on preexisting harm, intervening injurious events, the exclusion of alternate sources of mental distress, emotional harm and humiliation, and mitigation of damages.     

Fitts’ law holds for pointing movements under conditions of restricted visual feedback

Fitts’ law robustly predicts the time required to move rapidly to a target. However, it is unclear whether Fitts’ law holds for visually guided actions under visually restricted conditions. We tested whether Fitts’ law applies under various conditions of visual restriction and compared pointing movements in each condition. Ten healthy participants performed four pointing movement tasks under different visual feedback conditions, including full-vision (FV), no-hand-movement (NM), no-target-location (NT), and no-vision (NV) feedback conditions. The movement times (MTs) for each task exhibited highly linear relationships with the index of difficulty (r² > .96). These findings suggest that pointing movements follow Fitts’ law even when visual feedback is restricted or absent. However, the MTs and accuracy of pointing movements decreased for difficult tasks involving visual restriction.     

Losing claims of rights

Conclusion I have contended that acting on some principle and complaining when others act in accordance with the same principle in similar circumstances is morally improper. By wrongdoing one forfeits the right to claim the right (s)he disregards in interacting with others. This is not equivalent to a view that one's acting in a certain way justifies others acting in that way, i.e. that by wrongdoing one forfeits rights (s)he disregards in interacting with others. It may still be morally improper to treat malfeasors in the same way they treat us but, I have argued, they cannot themselves claim a right not to be treated in that way.This analysis of the right to claim rights can help explain the change in moral status of wrongdoers in two important ways. First, if there are some non-forfeitable human rights, the loss of moral standing of one who disregards those rights in others can be explained. Second, and perhaps potentially more important, if having a right implies the right holder's being justified in claiming it, we have a basis for saying all human rights are forfeitable.This second position would require a tightening of the link between the right to X and the ancillary right to claim the right to X. I have not undertaken that burden here. Instead, I argued that the loss of the right to claim is, itself, a significant loss.     

Habermas and validity claims

At the heart of Jürgen Habermas’s explication of communicative rationality is the contention that all speech acts oriented to understanding raise three different kinds of validity claims simultaneously: claims to truth, truthfulness, and normative rightness. This paper argues that Habermas presents exactly three distinct, logically independent arguments for his simultaneity thesis: an argument from structure; an argument from criticizability/rejectability; and an argument from understanding/reaching understanding. It is further maintained that the simultaneity thesis receives cogent support only from the Argument from understanding/reaching understanding, and only if the notion of ‘understanding’ is expanded to that of ‘agreement’.     

Figural properties are prioritized for search under conditions of uncertainty: Setting boundary conditions on claims that figures automatically attract attention

Nelson and Palmer (2007) concluded that figures/figural properties automatically attract attention, after they found that participants were faster to detect/discriminate targets appearing where a portion of a familiar object was suggested in an otherwise ambiguous display. We investigated whether these effects are truly automatic and whether they generalize to another figural property—convexity. We found that Nelson and Palmer’s results do generalize to convexity, but only when participants are uncertain regarding when and where the target will appear. Dependence on uncertainty regarding target location/timing was also observed for familiarity. Thus, although we could replicate and extend Nelson and Palmer’s results, our experiments showed that figures do not automatically draw attention. In addition, our research went beyond Nelson and Palmer’s, in that we were able to separate figural properties from perceived figures. Because figural properties are regularities that predict where objects lie in the visual field, our results join other evidence that regularities in the environment can attract attention. More generally, our results are consistent with Bayesian theories in which priors are given more weight under conditions of uncertainty.     

Kinesthetic Compensation for Sensorimotor Rearrangements

ABSTRACT

The authors report a new sensorimotor phenomenon in which participants use hand-sensed kinesthetic information to compensate for rotational sensorimotor rearrangements. This compensation benefits from conscious awareness and is related to hand posture. The technique can reduce control inefficiency with some misalignments by as much as 64%. The results support Y. Guiard's (1987) Guiard, Y. 1987. Asymmetric division of labor in human skilled bimanual action. Journal of Motor Behavior, 19: 486–517. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] suggestion that in bimanual tasks one hand provides an operational frame of reference for the other hand as in a closed kinematic chain. Results with right-handed participants show that the right and left hands are equally effective at providing such a cue. A constant-angular-targeting-error model, similar to that used for hand movements by H. Cunningham and I. Vardi (1990) and for walking by S. K. Rushton, J. M. Harris, M. R. Lloyd, and J. P. Wann (1998), is used to model the trajectories of targeting hand movements demonstrating the phenomenon. The model provides a natural parameter of the error.     

Evidence that photos promote rosiness for claims about the future

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims about the present or the past, a related but nonprobative photo can produce “truthiness,” an increase in the perceived truth of those claims (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). What we do not know is the extent to which nonprobative photos cause truthiness for the future. We addressed this issue in four experiments. In each experiment, people judged the truth of claims that the price of certain commodities (such as manganese) would increase (or decrease). Half of the time, subjects saw a photo of the commodity paired with the claim. Experiments 1A and 1B produced a “rosiness” bias: Photos led people to believe positive claims about the future but had very little effect on people’s belief in negative claims. In Experiment 2, rosiness occurred for both close and distant future claims. In Experiments 3A and 3B, we tested whether rosiness was tied to the perceived positivity of a claim. Finally, in Experiments 4A and 4B, we tested the rosiness hypothesis and found that rosiness was unique to claims about the future: When people made the same judgments about the past, photos produced the usual truthiness pattern for both positive and negative claims. Considered all together, our data fit with the idea that photos may operate as hypothesis-confirming evidence for people’s tendency to anticipate rosy future outcomes.     

Two claims about epistemic propriety

This paper has two main parts. In the first part, I argue that prominent moves in two related current debates in epistemology—viz., the debates over classical invariantism and the knowledge first movement—depend on one or the other of two claims about epistemic propriety: (1) Impropriety due to lack of a particular epistemic feature suffices for epistemic impropriety; and (2) Having justification to believe P suffices for having warrant to assert P. In the second part, I present and defend novel arguments against both claims.     

Validation of personality and cognitive measures for insurance claims examiners

Claims Examiners are critical for the profitability of large insurance companies. Mistakes in hiring these people can result in improperly processed claims and/or turnover, and this yields negative financial consequences for the company. This paper describes research evaluating the validity of selection procedures for the position of claims examiner at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma. A job analysis indicated that both cognitive skills and personal abilities are necessary for successful performance as a claims examiner. The job analysis also indicated that both subjective and objective criterion measures reflect important aspects of job performance. The criterion data included nine supervisory ratings, employee nominations, average percent of performance, absences, disciplinary actions, and sick leave. In a concurrent validation strategy, we tested a sample of experienced incumbents (N=50) using four cognitive ability tests (Basic Skills Tests: BST) and two measures of personality (Hogan Personality Inventory and PROFILE). Scales from two personality inventories were combined to form the Claims Examiner Inventory (CEI). Scores from the CEI and three of the four cognitive tests correlated significantly with the average percent of performance and six of the supervisory ratings, including the average supervisory rating. In addition to the cognitive measures, the personality measure contributed significantly to the prediction of percent of performance achieved with R=.64. These results are consistent with other research findings that support the use of both personality and cognitive measures as predictors of job performance.     

Christian protesters for democracy in Taiwan: a study of two American missionaries under Taiwanese martial law

Christians played a significant role in the course of Taiwan’s self-determination movements and the pro-democratic Tangwai movement during the 1960s and 1970s. While most researchers laid their focus on the Presbyterian Church ministers, the stories of Methodist pastor Milo Thornberry and Catholic priest Ronald Boccieri have rarely been mentioned. Thornberry helped Peng Ming-min to escape the country and Boccieri sheltered Chen Chu in his parish church. Consequently, the two American missionaries were listed as personae non gratae and expelled from the island by the Kuomintang (nationalist) regime. Although they were involved in the respective political incidents to different degrees, they had some things in common: compassion for native Taiwanese, concern for social justice and human rights, and conviction in witnessing to the gospel by non-violent action and fighting against injustice. This article uses interviews, autobiographies, memoirs, Foreign Ministry archives and newspapers to recount their stories that have not appeared in the historiography of their churches. It discusses how the Catholic and Methodist Churches maintained harmonious relations with the government for the benefit of their evangelistic work during the period of martial law. Finally it looks into the reasons why the two missionaries dared to disobey their churches’ official positions and the Washington government’s instruction that expatriates in Taiwan should not interfere in local politics.     

Regulating damage claims for emotional injuries before the First World War

During the late 19th century, as a result of litigation following railway accidents, damage claims for emotional injuries became a medico-legal issue. Efforts to find fair and socially acceptable means of settling such claims involved an interaction between medical theory and legal rules. Between 1866 and 1890 doctors debated the significance of ‘nervous’ symptoms, which resulted from accidents in which Little or no physical damage occurred. They rejected a strictly somatic interpretation of these symptoms and replaced it with a psychosomatic interpretation. Hoping to prevent a fiood of ‘false claims’, Anglo-American courts initially rejected this psychosomatic interpretation, and ruled against damages in cases where fear without physical impact was the cause of the plaintiffs symptoms. Later, common law courts accepted the psychosomatic perspective and granted damages for physical illnesses in which fear was ‘one link in the chain of causation’. While early appeals under workers' compensation laws followed these later courts, worries about the social consequences ofthese rulings were also evident in the years before the First World War.