Instrumentalism about practical reason: not by default

Instrumentalism is the view that all requirements of practical reason can be derived from the instrumental principle, that is, from the claim that one ought to take the suitable means to one's ends. Rationalists, by contrast, hold that there are requirements of practical reason that concern the normative acceptability of ends. To the extent that rationalists put forward these requirements in addition to the instrumental principle, rationalism might seem to go beyond instrumentalism in its normative commitments. This is why it is sometimes thought that rationalism is stronger than instrumentalism in a way that entails that instrumentalism is the default view, while rationalists carry the burden of proof. In this paper, I explore and discuss different ways of spelling out this idea. I argue that rationalism is not stronger than instrumentalism in a way that has implications for matters of justification and differences in prima facie defensibility of the two sorts of views.     

Less guilty by reason of adolescence: developmental immaturity, diminished responsibility, and the juvenile death penalty

The authors use a developmental perspective to examine questions about the criminal culpability of juveniles and the juvenile death penalty. Under principles of criminal law, culpability is mitigated when the actor's decision-making capacity is diminished, when the criminal act was coerced, or when the act was out of character. The authors argue that juveniles should not be held to the same standards of criminal responsibility as adults, because adolescents' decision-making capacity is diminished, they are less able to resist coercive influence, and their character is still undergoing change. The uniqueness of immaturity as a mitigating condition argues for a commitment to a legal environment under which most youths are dealt with in a separate justice system and none are eligible for capital punishment.     

Insanity defense research and treatment of insanity acquittees

This article is a comprehensive review of issues relevant to the insanity defense and the disposition of insanity acquittees. The characteristics of persons found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) are described. Although the locus of treatment of the NGRI acquittee varies by jurisdiction, at this time, care and detention of insanity acquittees fall mainly to state mental health agencies. Recent reforms, as they relate to locus of treatment, are reviewed and public policy issues are discussed. The author concludes that more clinical research on the insanity acquittee is necessary for the development of more informed public policy on the insanity defense.     

Care versus treatment at the end of life for profoundly disabled persons

Individuals who are profoundly mentally handicapped do not have the capacity to make their own decisions and also do not have a past record of decisions, from when they had capacity, to guide us in making decisions for them. They represent a difficult group, ethically, for surrogate decision making. Here I propose some guidelines, distinguishing between these patients and patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). As the life span of patients becomes shorter, or their level of consciousness becomes permanently impaired, the presumption for comfort care should become an imperative, and the standard of evidence to justify any invasive intervention should become higher. For members of this population, who have no more ability to refuse treatment than to consent to it, protection of the vulnerable must mean allowing a peaceful death as well as a comfortable life. Reasonable legal safeguards are also proposed to allow improved end-of-life decisions to be made for this population.     

Comprehension of indirect requests by persons with fluent aphasia

This study examined the judgments and response latencies of 10 participants with aphasia and 10 participants without aphasia for responses to indirect requests. Modals such as can and should were drawn from 5 indirect request categories. There was a significant difference in judgment errors and response latency between participants with and without aphasia. There were no significant differences between aphasic participants' judgments for literal versus nonliteral contrasts. There was a significant effect among the modals and among the categories of indirect requests. Response latency reflected aphasic participants' understanding of these indirect requests.     

The competency of criminal defendants to refuse,for delusional reasons,a viable insanity defense recommended by counsel

This article addresses the issues of whether mentally ill defendants charged with serious crimes who refuse to plead a viable and counsel-recommended insanity defense for delusional reasons (but who are otherwise competent to stand trial) should be considered to be competent, or incompetent, to stand trial; whether such defendants should be allowed to represent themselves with a delusional defense; and whether an insanity defense may properly be imposed upon such defendants. Based on an analysis of relevant Supreme Court decisions and other relevant cases, it is concluded that such defendants should not be allowed to go forward with a delusional defense (at least until reasonable efforts to treat the defendants' delusions are made). It is also argued, however, that unless an insanity defense would be viable (as well as recommended by counsel) delusional defendants who are otherwise competent to stand trial should be permitted to go forward, and represent themselves, with the defense of their choosing.     

Hemispheric differences are found in the identification,but not the detection,of low versus high spatial frequencies

The processing of sine-wave gratings presented to the left and right visual fields was examined in four experiments. Subjects were required either to detect the presence of a grating (Experiments 1 and 2) or to identify the spatial frequency of a grating (Experiments 3 and 4). Orthogonally to this, the stimuli were presented either at threshold levels of contrast (Experiments 1 and 3) or at suprathreshold levels (Experiments 2 and 4). Visual field and spatial frequency interacted when the task required identification of spatial frequency, but not when it required only stimulus detection. Regardless of contrast level (threshold, suprathreshold), high-frequency gratings were identified more readily in the right visual field (left hemisphere), whereas low-frequency gratings showed no visual field difference (Experiment 3) or were identified more readily in the left visual field (right hemisphere) (Experiment 4). Thus, hemispheric asymmetries in the processing of spatial frequencies depend on the task. These results support Sergent’s (1982) spatial frequency hypothesis, but only when the computational demands of the task exceed those required for the simple detection of the stimuli.     

The role of neuropsychology in the assessment and treatment of persons with epilepsy.

Several areas of current interest in the neuropsychology of epilepsy are briefly reviewed in this article. These include variables pertaining to seizures, seizure history, antiepileptic drugs, and methods of neuropsychological evaluation. It is apparent that epilepsy is a multifaceted area: Psychologists not only can be of great assistance to patients with this condition, but may also learn a great deal from this complex disorder.     

The effects of habituation training on compound conditioning are not reversed by an associative activation treatment

Rats received habituation to either 2 compound flavors (AX and BY; the activation group) or a compound and an element alone (AX and Y; the habituation group). They also received additional presentations of Y alone either after (Experiment 1) or intermixed (Experiment 2) with habituation. In the habituation group, A had undergone habituation whereas B had not; in the activation group, both A and B had undergone habituation, but presenting Y alone should result in associative activation of B and that, according to G. Hall (2003), should increase B's efficacy. A supplementary experiment demonstrated that the presentation of Y does activate a representation of B. In both experiments, an aversion was established to AB, and subsequently the habituation group showed a greater aversion to B than to A. However, in neither experiment was there any indication that the activation group showed a greater aversion to B than to A. These results are inconsistent with the suggestion that the associative activation of a stimulus representation in the absence of the stimulus reverses the effects of habituation training.     

A Handbook of Hospital Psychiatry by Louis Linn

Abstract

Violence in Israeli society has in recent years become more prevalent. Our Social and Welfare Services have been receiving more reports of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse within families and within Israeli society at large. In an attempt to address this problem, the authors selected eight girls, 14 to 15 years of age, to participate in a group to explore egalitarian relationships, with the goal of reducing the likelihood that members will enter a violent relationship. The group was part of a preventive intervention program for girls who were identified as being at high risk.

The participants met for a 12-session psychoeducational therapy group to discuss a range of different topics associated with egalitarian relationships and violence, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. After having completed the program, participants generally reported a high level of satisfaction. The girls mostly responded that participating in the group greatly enhanced their knowledge about egalitarian, non-abusive relationships, as well as their personal awareness of the implications of violent behavior.     

Neonatal treatment with monosodium glutamate does not alter grooming behavior induced by novelty or adrenocorticotropic hormone

The increased grooming behavior observed in a novel environment has been attributed to release of peptides derived from proopiomelanocortin (POMC), such as ACTH, alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (alpha-MSH), or beta-endorphin, which themselves can elicit grooming. This is because novelty-induced grooming is attenuated both by hypophysectomy and by antiserum to ACTH injected into the cerebral ventricles. Administration of monosodium glutamate (MSG) to neonatal rats destroys neurons in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, depleting the brain of POMC peptides, and also hypothalamic dopamine and choline acetyl-transferase activity. Neonatal MSG treatment did not significantly alter the grooming scores of adult rats in either home or novel environments compared to saline-treated animals. There were also no differences between MSG-and saline-treated rats in the grooming scores observed following graded doses of ACTH1-24 (0.2-1.0 micrograms) administered intracerebroventricularly. Thus if increased grooming in the novel environment is due to release into the ventricles of ACTH, alpha-MSH, beta-endorphin, these peptides more likely derive from the pituitary rather than from brain cells, although the failure of the MSG treatment to produce quantitative depletions of cerebral POMC peptides, especially in the brain stem, leaves open the latter possibility.     

A multinomial logit analysis of methods used by persons who completed suicide

This paper presents a multinomial logit analysis of the methods used by Taiwanese individuals who completed suicide between 1991 and 1993. We investigated the influence of age, gender, urban or rural residence, seasons, and occupations on the six "choices" of suicide methods. The findings suggest that a systematic pattern exists between the choice of method and demographic characteristics of persons who have completed suicide. Most of the different patterns of suicide by sex, age, occupation, or residence can be understood by the different availability and accessibility to the means of suicide faced by the individuals. Our findings support Becker's (1962, 1974, 1993) contention that all kinds of human behavior or choices are shaped by the constraints imposed on the individuals. The findings also have important policy implications for suicide prevention in that they support Lester's advocacy to prevent or reduce suicide incidents by limiting availability, blocking accessibility, or "inconveniencing" the suicidal individuals.