Preembryo Personhood: An Assessment of the President’s Council Arguments

The President’s Council on Bioethics has addressed the moral status of human preembryos in its reports on stem cell research and human therapeutic cloning. Although the Council has been criticized for being hand-picked to favor the right-to-life viewpoint concerning human preembryos, it has embraced the idea that the right-to-life position should be defended in secular terms. This is an important feature of the Council’s work, and it demonstrates a recognition of the need for genuine engagement between opposing sides in the debate over stem cell research. To promote this engagement, the Council has stated in secular terms several arguments for the personhood of human preembryos. This essay presents and critiques those arguments, and it concludes that they are unsuccessful. If the best arguments in support of the personhood of human preembryos have been presented by the Council, then there are no reasonable secular arguments in support of that view.     

Splitting embryos on the slippery slope: ethics and public policy.

Neither the George Washington University embryo splitting experiment nor the technique of embryo splitting itself has ethical flaws. The experiment harmed or wronged no one, and the investigators followed intramural review procedures for the experiment, although some might fault them for failing to seek extramural consultation or for not waiting until national guidelines for research on preembryos were developed. Ethical objections to such cloning on the basis of possible loss of individuality, possible lessening of individual worth, and concern about potential harm to the resulting children are discussed and challenged, as are objections to the creation of embryos for the purpose of genetic diagnosis. Many of the ethical questions raised by the George Washington experiment are similar to those posed by existing reproductive technologies that allow the simultaneous production of several embryos. A multidisciplinary group should consider whether regulation of cloning is needed, and laws should be enacted to prohibit a commercial market for all frozen embryos.     

Effects of short-term retrieval on adult age differences in long-term recall of actions.

In Experiment 1 young and elderly subjects either recalled or repeated after every block of 4 actions, whereas control subjects received neither interpolated short-term recall nor action repetition. On a later long-term memory test, experimental subjects, regardless of age or condition, recalled slightly more actions than control subjects. In Experiment 2 young adult and elderly subjects received 12 short-term memory trials in which 2 actions were performed on each trial, but only 1 was cued for recall after a brief retention interval filled with a distracting activity. On a later long-term memory test for the actions performed on the short-term trials, both young and elderly subjects recalled significantly more previously cued than noncued actions. The Age X Cuing Condition interaction was negligible. Prior retrieval of actions appears to enhance later recall regardless of age but seemingly only when prior retrieval requires considerable cognitive effort (as in Experiment 2).     

Task interruption and its effects on memory.

We investigated the recovery from memory of a primary task after an interruption. If the primary task lacked associative support among its task components, recovery was more difficult following an interruption that overlapped either completely or partially in the amount of information shared with the primary task (an interruption-similarity effect). In addition, memory for completed actions was superior to memory for impending unfinished actions. However, if the primary task had associative support among its task components, there was no adverse effect of interruption similarity, and completed and unfinished actions were recalled equally well. We explore possible explanations and implications of these results.     

How people explain actions performed by groups and individuals.

The authors explore whether people explain intentional actions performed by groups differently from actions performed by individuals, A theoretical framework is offered that distinguishes between 2 modes of explanation: the agent's reasons (beliefs or desires in light of which the agent decided to act) and causal histories of reasons (CHRs; factors that preceded and brought about the agent's reasons). The authors develop the hypothesis that people use more CHR explanations when explaining group actions than when explaining individual actions. Study 1 demonstrates this asymmetry. Studies 2 and 3 explore 2 necessary conditions for the asymmetry: that the group be perceived as an aggregate of individual actors rather thin as a jointly acting group and that explainers have general information available about the group. Discussion focuses on people's perception of groups as entities and agents.     

Source memory for action in young and older adults: self vs. close or unknown others

The present study examines source memory for actions (e.g., placing items in a suitcase). For both young and older adult participants, source memory for actions performed by the self was better than memory for actions performed by either a known (close) or unknown other. In addition, neither young nor older adults were more likely to confuse self with close others than with unknown others. Results suggest an advantage in source memory for actions performed by the self compared to others, possibly associated with sensorimotor cues that are relatively preserved in aging.     

Toddlers' attention to intentions-in-action in learning novel action words.

Toddlers' ability to use cues such as eye gaze and gestures to infer the meaning of novel action words was examined. In Experiment 1, 21- and 27-month-olds were taught labels for pairs of videotaped actions that were either similar or dissimilar in appearance. Similar actions differed mainly in the presence of behavioral cues related to the agents' intentions (e.g., extended arms). Only the older children were able to learn the labels for the similar actions. In Experiment 2, 3 new pairs of labels (2 similar, 1 dissimilar) were taught to children in the same age range. Eye gaze and gestures were the main features distinguishing the similar events. The same developmental effect was observed, with only the older children showing learning of both types of verbs and the younger children being impeded by the appearance of the actions. The results show that by the middle of the 2nd year, children begin to consider intentions-in-action when acquiring the meaning of novel action verbs.     

Developmental changes in memory source monitoring.

Previous research suggests that children are more likely than adults to confuse memories of actions they imagined themselves performing with memories of actions they actually performed (Realization Judgments), but are not more likely to confuse memories of actions they had imagined performing with memories of actions they saw another person perform (Reality Monitoring). We approach these findings in terms of a theory about the processes by which people identify the sources of their recollections (Source Monitoring). This approach suggests that children may be more likely than adults to confuse memories from different sources whenever the sources are highly similar to one another. Experiments 1 and 2 tested this hypothesis by manipulating the perceptual and semantic similarity of two sources of information and testing 4- and 6-year-old and adult subjects' recollection of the sources of particular pieces of information. Experiment 3 tested the hypothesis that children are more likely than adults to mistakenly identify memories of things they imagined another person doing as memories of things they witnessed that person doing. The findings indicate that (a) people are more likely to confuse memories from similar than dissimilar sources, (b) source monitoring improves during the preschool and childhood years, and (c) children may be especially vulnerable to the effects of source similarity.     

Psycholinguistic norms for action photographs in French and their relationships with spoken and written latencies.

A set of 142 photographs of actions (taken from Fiez & Tranel, 1997) was standardized in French on name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, imageability, age of acquisition, and duration of the depicted actions. Objective word frequency measures were provided for the infinitive modal forms of the verbs and for the cumulative frequency of the verbal forms associated with the photographs. Statistics on the variables collected for action items were provided and compared with the statistics on the same variables collected for object items. The relationships between these variables were analyzed, and certain comparisons between the current database and other similar published databases of pictures of actions are reported. Spoken and written naming latencies were also collected for the photographs of actions, and multiple regression analyses revealed that name agreement, image agreement, and age of acquisition are the major determinants of action naming speed. Finally, certain analyses were performed to compare object and action naming times. The norms and the spoken and written naming latencies corresponding to the pictures are available on the Internet (http://www.psy.univ-bpclermont.fr/~pbonin/pbonin-eng.html) and should be of great use to researchers interested in the processing of actions.     

Intention and Permissibility: T. M. Scanlon

It is clearly impermissible to kill one person (or refrain from giving him treatment that he needs in order to survive) because his organs can be used to save five others who are in need of transplants. It has seemed to many that the explanation for this lies in the fact that in such cases we would be intending the death of the person whom we killed, or failed to save. What makes these actions impermissible, however, is not the agent's intention but rather the fact that the benefit envisaged does not justify an exception to the prohibition against killing or the requirement to give aid. The difference between this explanation and one appealing to intention is easily overlooked if one fails to distinguish between the prospective use of a moral principle to guide action and its retrospective use to appraise the way an agent governed him or herself. Even if this explanation is accepted, however, it remains an open question whether and how an agent's intention may be relevant to the permissibility of actions in other cases.     

Freud: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis Edited by N. Fodor and F. Gaynor

Acting out should be expected in the treatment of incest victims. These persons attempt to communicate through actions a plethora of confusing feelings resulting from the incest; such actions occur outside the therapy sessions and their meanings are out of the patient's awareness. Working through the underlying feelings is the necessary therapeutic task. It is unlikely that acting-out behavior will be completely eliminated, but the development of self-acceptance and a willingness to explore the meaning of the behaviors are reasonable and attainable therapeutic goals with the help of the other group members.

Three areas of acting out are elucidated: sex, power and sadism, and self-destructiveness. Clinical vignettes drawn from the authors' experience conducting group psychotherapy are used to illustrate both acting out and working through.     

Visual-motor recalibration in geographical slant perception.

In 4 experiments, it was shown that hills appear steeper to people who are encumbered by wearing a heavy backpack (Experiment 1), are fatigued (Experiment 2), are of low physical fitness (Experiment 3), or are elderly and/or in declining health (Experiment 4). Visually guided actions are unaffected by these manipulations of physiological potential. Although dissociable, the awareness and action systems were also shown to be interconnected. Recalibration of the transformation relating awareness and actions was found to occur over long-term changes in physiological potential (fitness level, age, and health) but not with transitory changes (fatigue and load). Findings are discussed in terms of a time-dependent coordination between the separate systems that control explicit visual awareness and visually guided action.     

U.S. and Canadian Attitudes Toward International Interactions: A Cross-National Test of the Double-Standard Hypothesis

In the early 1960s Oskamp (1965) found that American university students displayed a double standard toward similar or identical actions of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Our research replicates and extends Oskamp's study. Using some of Oskamp's original statements that are still applicable to U.S. and Soviet actions (as well as adding several to update US-Soviet relations), parallel questionnaires were distributed to American and French-Canadian university students. Both groups displayed a double standard, although this was more pronounced for Americans than for Canadians. The effects of gender, education, and partisan affiliation are also examined, but generally found to be insignificant.     

An analysis of ideomotor action.

This article presents a framework based on the work of R. H. Lotze (1852), W. James (1890), and A. G. Greenwald (1970) for understanding ideomotor actions that tend to arise when individuals watch others perform certain actions. Two principles of ideomotor action induction are distinguished: perceptual induction, in which people tend to perform the movements they see, and intentional induction, in which people tend to perform movements suited to achieve what they would like to see. In 3 experiments, ideomotor hand, head, and foot movements were studied while participants watched a ball traveling toward a target. Results showed strong support for intentional induction, weaker support for perceptual induction, and a strong impact of the effector studied. The representational basis of action induction (stimulus vs. goal representations) and the automaticity of the underlying processing (task-dependent vs. task-independent induction) were considered.     

Perception of biological motion: a stimulus set of human point-light actions.

We present a set of stimuli representing human actions under point-light conditions, as seen from different viewpoints. The set contains 22 fairly short, well-delineated, and visually "loopable" actions. For each action, we provide movie files from five different viewpoints as well as a text file with the three spatial coordinates of the point lights, allowing researchers to construct customized versions. The full set of stimuli may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Analysis of recent empirical challenges to an account of interceptive timing.

How do we perceive how long it will be before we reach a certain place when running, driving, or skiing? How do we perceive how long it will be before a moving object reaches us or will arrive at a place where it can be hit or caught? These are questions of how we temporally coordinate our actions with a dynamic environment so as to control collision events. Much of the theoretical work on the control of these interceptive actions has been united in supposing that (1) timing is functionally separable from positioning and the two are controlled using different types of information; (2) timing is controlled using special-purpose time-to-arrival information; (3) the time-to-arrival information used for the timing of fast interceptive actions is a first-order approximation to the actual time-to-arrival, which does not take accelerations into account. Challenges to each of these suppositions have recently emerged, suggesting that a complete rethinking of how interceptions are controlled may be necessary. These challenges are analyzed in detail and it is shown that they are readily accommodated by a recent theory of interceptive timing based on the points just noted.     

Mismatches in social support and psychosocial adjustment to breast cancer.

Emotional support is known to provide psychosocial benefits for women with breast cancer, but women can experience a mismatch between support that is wanted and support that is received from their personal supporter. The role of wanted and unwanted support in psychosocial adjustment was examined in 79 women recovering from breast cancer. Four distinct patterns of desired support actions were found using cluster analysis. Patterns of wanted support were not related to better or worse psychosocial adjustment. However, a misalignment of support between the provider and the receiver significantly influenced psychosocial adjustment, and unwanted but received support (support commission) was uniquely associated with poor psychosocial adjustment. Clinical interventions using the support instrument could help match support providers' actions to receivers' preferences.     

U.S. mental health policy. Doomed to fail.

Changes in the de facto system of mental health care in the last decade reflect organizational and entrepreneurial responsiveness to changes in health policy, not mental health policy. Various other actions described here reduced statutory or institutional leadership roles in mental health and increased the pace at which mental health policy was becoming dependent on health policy. In turn, U.S. health policy in the 20th century has been inherently flawed. The short-term general hospital--the "doctors' workshop"--emphasizing acute care and surgery, has been the cornerstone of U.S. health policy throughout the 20th century. The mimicry of health services by mental health leads to demonstrably more expensive and less effective mental health care and dooms mental health policy to failure.