The cognitive integration of scientific instruments: information,situated cognition,and scientific practice

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences, particularly those working in laboratories, use a variety of artifacts to help them perform their...     

Social justice, federal paternalism, and feminism: breast implants in the cultural context of female beauty.

In April 1992 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it was restricting the availability of silicone gel-filled breast implants to women enrolled in clinical trials. All candidates for breast reconstruction, but only a "very limited" number of augmentation candidates, would have access to the implants. This policy has been criticized as paternalistic, sexist, and unjustified by scientific data. I examine these charges and conclude that controversy surrounding the scientific data weakens the FDA's paternalistic mandate and that its policy of treating reconstruction and augmentation candidates differently results in increased social injustice and perpetuates cultural biases concerning female beauty and women's rights to control their bodies. I also argue that these cultural biases shape women's subjective experience of their physical selves and should not, contrary to some feminist arguments, be viewed as precluding their giving informed consent to breast surgery.     

The Stroop effect at 80: The competition between stimulus control and cognitive control

For more than 80 years, researchers have examined the interference between automatic processing of stimuli, such as the meaning of color words, on performance of a controlled‐processing task such as naming the color in which words are printed. The Stroop effect and its many variations provide an ideal test platform for examining the competition between stimulus control and cognitive control of attention, as reflected in behavior. The two experiments reported here show that rhesus monkeys, like human adults, show interference from incongruous stimulus conditions in a number‐Stroop task, and that the monkeys may be particularly susceptible to influence from response strength and less able, relative to human adults, of using executive attention to minimize this interference.     

Religion and Science: The Embodiment of the Conversation: A Postmodern Sociological Perspective

In this paper I present a model of analysis of religion and science as forms of social construction of knowledge from the perspective of postmodern sociology. Numerous works have been recently published on the possible relations between religion and science. Most authors address this relationship from the perspectives of theology, philosophy, or selected disciplines of natural sciences (Ian Barbour, John Haught, John Polkinghorne). My goal is to add to that discussion a voice from the perspective of social sciences, specifically postmodern sociology. The model I propose brings the religion-science conversation down to earth, that is, to the level of people who "live" religion and science on a daily basis. The theoretical frame-work for my analysis of religion and science and of their relationship is constructed on the basis of selected works of leading postmodern sociologists Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, and Piotr Sztompka. I begin with a brief summary of the basic ontological and methodological presuppositions of the postmodern approach to reality. This summary is followed by a clarification of meanings of certain concepts that are crucial for the understanding of my model. Then, I present the model of analysis of religion and science and, finally, make some suggestions for sociology of religion and sociology of science that might open new opportunities and challenges for future research of the interface between religion and science in the postmodern culture.     

The biopsychosocial approach to chronic pain: scientific advances and future directions

The prevalence and cost of chronic pain is a major physical and mental health care problem in the United States today. As a result, there has been a recent explosion of research on chronic pain, with significant advances in better understanding its etiology, assessment, and treatment. The purpose of the present article is to provide a review of the most noteworthy developments in the field. The biopsychosocial model is now widely accepted as the most heuristic approach to chronic pain. With this model in mind, a review of the basic neuroscience processes of pain (the bio part of biopsychosocial), as well as the psychosocial factors, is presented. This spans research on how psychological and social factors can interact with brain processes to influence health and illness as well as on the development of new technologies, such as brain imaging, that provide new insights into brain-pain mechanisms.     

The origin of language: A scientific approach to the study of man

The Enlightenment regarded language as one of the most significant achievements of man. Consequently inquiries into the origin and development of language play a central role in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. This new science of man consciously adopts the method of analysis and synthesis used in the natural sciences of the time. In moral philosophy, analysis corresponds to the search for the basic principles of human nature. Synthesis is identified with the attempt to interpret all artificial achievements of man (arts, sciences and institutions) as the effect of these principles and of man's physical and social environment - an attempt known as theoretical history. The type of explanation envisaged by theoretical historians is based on the principle of causality. It consists in a genetic reconstruction of the social phenomenon under investigation. Inquiries into the origin of language follow this pattern of explanation. They form part of theoretical history and thus represent a major aspect of the eighteenth-century scientific study of man.     

Effects of personal causation and perceived control on responses to an aversive environment: The more control,the better

A laboratory experiment was conducted to investigate the effects on reactions to aversive noise of three types of personal control: control over the initiation of noise, control over its termination, and combined control over both initiation and termination. On an attention-to-detail measure which occurred concurrently with noise stimulation, subjects' error rates decreased linearly as degree of control increased. Likewise, on a post-noise measure of task persistence, subjects' performance rates increased linearly across the three conditions as degree of control increased. Results were discussed in terms of Seligman's theory of learned helplessness and deCharms' theory of personal causation, and the motivational effects of personal control were emphasized.     

Measurement error and the correlation between positive and negative affect: spearman (1904, 1907) revisited

There has been considerable debate in the literature on the structure of affect, especially on the correlation between positive and negative affect and the effect of measurement error on this correlation. In this brief article, it is shown that, as Spearman (1904, 1907) noted, the extent to which the correlation between imperfect measures is attenuated by measurement error depends upon the reliabilities of the measures used.