We live to create dissonance: is it possible to be a Christian and racist?

Confronted with the reality of the limited exposure to human diversity among their students at two Christian universities, two African American professors relate their efforts to prepare students to teach in the twenty‐first century. This article is a reflective report on the strategies and events that occurred as a result of challenging students' long‐held beliefs and attitudes. Strategies were deliberately provocative and disturbing, intended to create dissonance within the students related to Christian ideals and perceptions of non‐European Americans. Ultimately, students confronted the question: Is it possible to be a Christian and racist?     

Typicality effects in artificial categories: is there a hemisphere difference?

In category classification tasks, typicality effects are usually found: accuracy and reaction time depend upon distance from a prototype. In this study, subjects learned either verbal or nonverbal dot pattern categories, followed by a lateralized classification task. Comparable typicality effects were found in both reaction time and accuracy across visual fields for both verbal and nonverbal categories. Both hemispheres appeared to use a similarity-to-prototype matching strategy in classification. This indicates that merely having a verbal label does not differentiate classification in the two hemispheres.     

An emerging postural response: is control of the hip possible in the newly walking child?

Previous researchers have proposed that because of their slow muscle-response latencies, 1- to 2-year-old children are unable to control hip-dominant postural responses when responding to balance threats (G. McCollum & T. Leen, 1989). To test that proposition, the authors exposed 41 children to backward support-surface translations and recorded muscle activations and movement kinematics. Children between 10 months and 10 years of age stood on a platform that was unexpectedly moved. Passive hip-dominant responses were observed among the least experienced walkers. In contrast, older children produced an active response, signified by higher levels of abdominal and quadriceps muscle activity and accompanied by larger hip flexor torques. Greater success in withstanding large magnitudes of perturbations were associated with actively generated hip responses.     

Just a Cog in the Machine? The Individual Responsibility of Researchers in Nanotechnology is a Duty to Collectivize

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) provides a framework for judging the ethical qualities of innovation processes, however guidance for researchers on how to implement such practices is limited. Exploring RRI in the context of nanotechnology, this paper examines how the dispersed and interdisciplinary nature of the nanotechnology field somewhat hampers the abilities of individual researchers to control the innovation process. The ad-hoc nature of the field of nanotechnology, with its fluid boundaries and elusive membership, has thus far failed to establish a strong collective agent, such as a professional organization, through which researchers could collectively steer technological development in light of social and environmental needs. In this case, individual researchers cannot innovate responsibly purely by themselves, but there is also no structural framework to ensure that responsible development of nanotechnologies takes place. We argue that, in such a case, individual researchers have a duty to collectivize. In short, researchers in situations where it is challenging for individual agents to achieve the goals of RRI are compelled to develop organizations to facilitate RRI. In this paper we establish and discuss the criteria under which individual researchers have this duty to collectivize.     

Distance perception in a natural outdoor setting: is there a developmental trend to overconstancy?

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate whether in natural environment, using very large physical distances, there is a trend to overconstancy for distance estimates during development. One hundred and twenty-nine children aged 5 to 13 years old and twenty-one adults (in a control group), participated as observers. The observer's task was to bisect egocentric distances, ranging from 1.0 to 296.0 m, presented in a large open field. The analyses focused on two parameters, constant errors and variable errors, such as measuring accuracy and precision, respectively. A third analysis focused on the developmental pattern of shifts in constancy as a function of age and range of distances. Constant error analysis showed that there are two relevant parameters for accuracy, age, and range of distances. For short distances, there are three developmental stages: 5-7 years, when children have unstable responses, 7-11, underconstancy, and 13 to adulthood, when accuracy is reached. For large distances, there is a two-stage development: 5-11 years, with severe underconstancy, and beyond this age, with mild underconstancy. Variable errors analyses indicate that precision is noted for 7 year-old children, independently of the range of distances. The constancy analyses indicated that there is a shift from constancy (or slightly overconstancy) to underconstancy as a function of physical distance for all age groups. The age difference is noted in the magnitude of underconstancy that occurs in larger distances, where adults presented lower levels of underconstancy than children. The present data were interpreted as due to a developmental change in cognitive processing rather than to changes in visual space perception.     

`Funda-Mentality': is the conscious mind subtly linked to a basic level of the universe?

Age-old battle lines over the puzzling nature of mental experience are shaping a modern resurgence in the study of consciousness. On one side are the long-dominant `physicalists' who view consciousness as an emergent property of the brain's neural networks. On the alternative, rebellious side are those who see a necessary added ingredient: proto-conscious experience intrinsic to reality, perhaps understandable through modern physics (panpsychists, pan-experientialists, `funda-mentalists'). It is argued here that the physicalist premise alone is unable to solve completely the difficult issues of consciousness and that to do so will require supplemental panpsychist/pan-experiential philosophy expressed in modern physics. In one scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity. The proposed process is Roger Penrose's `objective reduction' (OR), a self-organizing `collapse' of the quantum wave function related to instability at the most basic level of space-time geometry. In the Penrose-Hameroff model of `orchestrated objective reduction' (Orch OR), OR quantum computation occurs in cytoskeletal microtubules within the brain's neurons. The basic thesis is that consciousness involves brain activities coupled to self-organizing ripples in fundamental reality.     

Developmental shift in the discrimination of vowel contrasts in bilingual infants: is the distributional account all there is to it?

A shift from language‐general to language‐specific sound discrimination abilities has been largely attested in different populations of infants during the second half of the first year of life; however, data are still scarce regarding bilingual populations. Previous research with 4‐, 8‐ and 12‐month‐old Catalan‐Spanish bilingual infants had offered evidence of a U‐shaped pattern in their ability to discriminate a language‐specific vowel contrast. This research explores monolingual and bilingual 4‐ and 8‐month‐olds’ capacities to discriminate two common vowel contrasts: /o–u/ and /e–u/. All groups succeeded except 8‐month‐old bilinguals tested on the phonetically close /o–u/ contrast. Discrimination was not facilitated when talker and token variability were reduced. A U‐shaped pattern was again found when data from an additional group of 12‐month‐olds were included. These results confirm bilinguals’ specific developmental pattern of perceptual reorganization for acoustically close vowels and challenge an interpretation merely based on a distributional account.     

Similarity among tasks is the key to show generalization of cognitive training effects in Alzheimer’s disease: a case study

Cognitive training can allow patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to reinforce individual cognitive abilities. In the present case study, we investigated the generalizability of trained cognitive skills to novel tasks, and their stability over time.

One AD patient underwent a structured cognitive training using the GEO (Geographical Exercise for cognitive Optimization) task, whereas eight AD patients underwent a control cognitive intervention. Participants’ performances on the GEO task, on a similar untrained cognitive task, and on a different untrained cognitive task were recorded before and after the intervention, and at the follow-up. On both the trained and the similar untrained tasks patients’ and controls’ performance significantly differed from one another. Our preliminary evidence shows that a cognitive training could allow patients to improve and maintain their performance not only on the trained task, but also on a similar task.     

Co-occurring disorders: a possible key to visual perceptual deficits in children with developmental coordination disorder?

A study was conducted to examine how visual perceptual functioning in children with DCD may be influenced by co-occurring learning problems such as reading disabilities (RD) and/or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Participants included seven groups of children: 27 children with DCD only, 11 with ADHD only, 14 with RD only, 63 with DCD and at least one other disorder (i.e., DCD + ADHD, DCD + RD, DCD + ADHD + RD), and 73 typically developing controls. Visual perceptual skills were assessed using the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills (TVPS) and the Rey Osterreith Complex Figure (ROCF; copy and delayed recall). Children with DCD and at least one other disorder were found to have impairments on the TVPS compared to children with DCD only, ADHD only, and typically developing controls, particularly on subtests assessing visual memory. On the ROCF, children with DCD and at least one other disorder scored significantly lower than children with ADHD only or RD only. Children with DCD plus one other disorder were then subdivided into three groups: DCD + ADHD, DCD + RD, and DCD + ADHD + RD and compared to children with DCD only, ADHD only, and RD only. Results indicated that children with DCD + ADHD + RD had significant impairments on the TVPS compared to children with DCD only and children with ADHD only. On the ROCF, children with DCD + ADHD + RD scored significantly lower than all of the groups, except the DCD+RD group. These findings suggest that DCD on its own is not associated with visual perceptual problems; rather, it is the presence of co-occurring disorders that is a possible key to visual perceptual deficits in children with DCD. The number of co-occurring disorders present with DCD is associated with the severity of the visual perceptual dysfunction. Deficits in visual memory skills appear to be a specific area of difficulty for children with DCD and co-occurring RD and/or ADHD.     

Motor programming: does the choice of the limb which is to carry out the response imply a delay?

In many activities, the human being must quickly decide on the response to be produced following a change in the environment. In some of these situations, the limb that the individual chooses to carry out a response seems to be a significant element in performance. Thus, if the individual carries out the response with the limb closest to the target, the performance can improve because it will take less time to achieve the goal. However, it seems that in these situations, the human being does not take this decrease in movement time into consideration and that the response is carried out with the dominant hand. Why is this so? It may be because the reaction is faster when there doesn't have to be a choice as to which limb will carry out the response. The goal of this study was to check this possibility. In order to do so, the subjects performed a two choice reaction-time task. For this task, some subjects knew beforehand which hand they had to use to carry out the response while other subjects were unaware of this fact. The results of two experiments indicated that the choice of the limb which is to carry out the response requires no particular delay when the movement to be produced is externally guided.     

Looking again at the team dimension in systemic psychotherapy: is attending to group process a critical context for practice?

Team work and group supervision are essential features of the systemic model, yet there is surprisingly little literature on the impact of group process on both group supervision and team-based therapy. Beginning with two vignettes which evoke some aspects of group process and are based on the personal experiences of the authors, this paper will review the literature on working in teams from within a systemic perspective. ¹ Early models of teams and group processes within the literature will be criticized for their over-reliance on technique; more recent models for their over-reliance on collaboration. It will be argued that some systemic approaches to understanding teams can lead to group process issues becoming marginalized and covert, and therefore inevitably more difficult to address. However, viewing supervision groups as 'social constructions' is seen as a position offering more possibilities and, it will be argued, opens a pathway to embracing ideas from within psychoanalytic thinking on group process. Here ideas on group functioning, including the theories of, for example, Foulkes and Bion will be briefly reviewed and their implications for helping both supervisors and teams conceptualize group process discussed.     

The debate over food biotechnology in the United States: is a societal consensus achievable?

Unless the public comes to agree that the benefits of food biotechnology are desirable and the associated risks are acceptable, our society may fail to realize much of the potential benefits. Three historical cases of major technological innovations whose benefits and risks were the subject of heated public controversy are examined, in search of lessons that may suggest a path toward consensus in the biotechnology debate. In each of the cases—water fluoridation, nuclear power and pesticides—proponents of the technology gathered scientific evidence that they believed established that the innovations were safe. In each case, the federal government was heavily involved in oversight, safety regulation, and in the first two cases, active promotion of the technology. Supporters of the technologies employed a variety of communications strategies, ranging from massive “educational” campaigns (e.g. “Our Friend The Atom”) to vituperative ad hominem attacks on leading opponents. None of these strategies succeeded in achieving broad societal acceptance of the technologies. Fluoridation today is opposed as vigorously by activist groups as it was when first introduced around 1950; it has not been universally adopted even in the U.S., and it has been rejected in most other countries. The American nuclear power industry is moribund, and the public has essentially rejected the technology. The pesticide industry is thriving, with new generations of products succeeding older more hazardous chemicals in a constant cycle. However, strong regulation has failed to prevent adverse health and ecological effects, which have been empirically associated with pesticide uses after the chemicals were dispersed in the environment. Debate over whether risks of such effects are acceptable has been heated for four decades, with scientists and the public divided. None of these cases offers an ideal model for the biotechnology revolution, though they do reveal many strategies that have not worked. The biotechnology debate is also taking place at a time when our concepts of risk communication have improved, and when many consumers are more actively concerned with buying products perceived to be less likely to harm the environment. Based on the three case histories and more recent trends, some characteristics of a process for seeking a societal consensus are described. They include explicitly defining the subjects for consensus; including all stakeholders in a respectful dialogue; confronting value issues, such as acceptability of risks and ethical perceptions; listening to others’ perspectives, and being willing to change one’s own point of view. If activists on all sides of the food biotechnology debate are willing to commit to such a consensus-building process, there is hope that the U.S. national debate can be resolved in a manner satisfactory to essentially all parties.     

Professional judgement in the assessment of risk: is there a role for systemic practice?

Risk assessment is an example of professional decision‐making pared to its stark essentials. Political pressures towards accountability and the need for defensible decisions encourage a ‘tick‐box’ approach to risk assessment, but this can create unrealistic expectations of certainty. In practice, as technological approaches produce ever more complex formal tools for assessing risk, their effectiveness remains dubious while our human decision‐making apparatus is marginalized. This article examines whether we should respect our ability to apprehend complex multi‐stranded narrative realities intuitively, with the hope that such intuitions might contribute to professional decision‐making. This idea is explored with reference to a case study.     

Age rationing and the just distribution of health care: is there a duty to die?

The author analyzes the argument that a policy involving distributive justice in the allocation of scarce health care resources, based on the strategy of rational self interest maximation under a veil of ignorance (Rawls/Daniels), would result in an age rationing system of voluntary, socially encouraged, direct termination of the lives of the elderly rather than their medical abandonment. She maintains that such a policy would be a fair response only in a situation of substantial scarcity of resources that cannot be relieved without introducing greater injustices. Battin suggests that some of the current pressure on resources could be reduced by pruning waste and the expenses attributable to paternalistic imposition of treatment and to the practice of defensive medicine. She also advocates reconsideration of societal priorities assigned to various social goods.