Predatory Conferences: What Are the Signs?

Like predatory journals, predatory conferences are a growing part of the academic landscape, but unlike their journal counterparts, to date predatory conferences have not been extensively investigated, and many unanswered questions about their workings exist. From a positive ethics perspective, a more complete understanding of predatory conferences is desirable, as it can support researchers in making ethically appropriate choices about conference attendance. Ten predatory conference organisations were the focus of this study. The investigation first set out to identify and document the attributes of such conferences. They were then analysed to understand which attributes can most easily and reliably be used to distinguish them from legitimate conferences. A tool to assist prospective participants is introduced. The implications for positive ethics, in terms of making decisions about conference attendance, are discussed.

     

Pigeons and Children: What Are the Differences?

The Psychological Record -     

What Are Degrees of Belief?

Probabilism is committed to two theses:

An Unfinished Debate: What Are the Aims of Religion and Science?

I discuss the kinds of fundamental questions that must be addressed by people who develop theories about how religion and science are (or should be) related. After categorizing these questions as axiological, epistemological, ontological, or semantic, I focus on those that concern the goals of religion and science (the axiological issues). By distinguishing between epistemic and practical goals, individual and collective goals, and manifest and latent goals, I identify seven axiological questions. The various answers that religion/science theorists give or presuppose to these axiological questions help to explain why such deep, ongoing differences continue among them.     

In What Sense Are Positive and Negative Affect Independent?

We agree with most of the claims made by Tellegen, Watson, and Clark: Pleasant and unpleasant affect (i.e., happiness and unhappiness) are strongly negatively correlated; random and nonrandom error need to be taken into account before interpreting correlations among affect scales; scales of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) embedded within the affective circumplex are orthogonal in theory, as are pleasure and arousal; and two-dimensional views of the affective space are more valid and useful than one- or three- dimensional models. Finally, and most important, we agree that PA and NA, as typically operationalized, are not independent, despite what may be the case theoretically. In this brief rejoinder, we offer some reasons why measurement problems likely prevent PA and NA from being measured orthogonally, why the factor analytic work reported in the target article is unlikely to shed new light on the perplexing problem of how best to characterize and measure affect, and why Pleasantness and Arousal tend to be operationally superior to their PA and NA counterparts.     

What Are the Confidentiality Rights of Collaterals in Family Therapy?

The privacy rights of collateral family members constitute one of the most complex ethical issues in the field of family therapy. The author opens with four case studies which illustrate some of the dilemmas. The opening section reviews the APA Ethics Code on this topic, followed by an in depth analysis of confidentiality issues in marital therapy and the special ethical dilemmas of high conflict, child custody cases. The author reviews the scant case law on this topic and closes with a set of best practices guidelines for the clinician.     

What Kind of Narcissist Are You?

We are all narcissists, and necessarily so, since healthy narcissism is one of the main routes available to us for nourishing and protecting ourselves. Like all personality traits, narcissism is dimensional. For our own good, and for that of those whose lives we touch, it is useful to know what kind of narcissist we are, and to what effect. When my own narcissism was tweaked by an event that left most people relatively nonplussed, I examined the implications of this psychic insult. I looked to the contents of my narcissistic mirror, asking who and what had contributed to that template. After this analysis, I was able to see more clearly and concretely how helpful the concept of narcissism can be when trying to understand both normal and pathological behavior.     

What Is the Active Ingredients Equation for Success in Executive Coaching?

In this response, we address commentator concerns about the generalizability of the active ingredients of psychotherapy to the science and practice of executive coaching. We discuss four ingredient that may make a difference: (a) client characteristics, (b) goals or success criteria, (c) role of the organization, and (d) contextual knowledge of the executive coach. We explore how each of these differences is likely to affect the weighting of the four active ingredients in the equation for predicting executive coaching outcomes. From this analysis, we re-affirm our hypotheses that the active ingredients are generalizable to coaching and hold promise for strengthening research and practice. We conclude by highlighting the efforts of several commentators to extend and deepen our hypotheses to other areas of leadership development.     

Framing Posthumous Organ Donation in Terms of Reciprocity: What Are the Emotional Consequences?

Posthumous organ donation was framed in terms of reciprocity by asking young participants to respond to another person who was or was not registered as an organ donor, while simultaneously manipulating participants' own registration status. Participants were additionally required to adopt the perspective of a potential donor or recipient of organs. The influence of these variables on self-reported anger, fear, pity, guilt, gratitude, and positive self-feelings is systematically described. The results illustrate the relative independence of self-preservational and altruistic motives in organ donation. Practical implications are discussed.     

What Principles Are Used to Judge the Fairness of Retrenchment Actions?

The present study identified the bipolar principles that workers use for evaluating the fairness of a broad range of negative organizational events. Two hundred forty-eight respondents were asked to describe recent negative events that occurred in their organizations, and explain the reasons for their fairness perceptions of the events. The responses were coded to yield 5 principles associated with outcome fairness and 8 principles associated with process fairness; this set included principles not found in earlier taxonomies. Support for previous justice models and needed areas of research are discussed.     

Analyzing Team Performance: In the Eye of the Beholder?

The effect of team-member experience was examined in relation to perceptions of importance of teamwork behaviors during an analysis of team performance. Impor- tance ratings were collected from military aircrews (i.e., two-member teams) from three distinct types of aircraft. Results indicated that when assessing team behavior importance, less experienced team members weighted difficulty of performing team behaviors more heavily, whereas more experienced team members weighted time spent performing team behaviors more heavily. Implications for analyzing team performance, with respect to the process of conducting such analyses and the type of information collected, are discussed.     

What Are Quantities?

This paper presents a view of quantities as ‘adverbial’ entities of a certain kind—more specifically, determinate ways, or modes, of having length, mass, speed, and the like. In doing so, it will be argued that quantities as such should be distinguished from quantitative properties or relations, and are not universals but are particulars, although they are not (Fregean) objects, either. A main advantage of the adverbial view over its rivals will be found in its superior explanatory power with respect to both certain fundamental principles of quantity and ordinary quantitative reasoning involving quantitative relations like three times as long as and 2 metres longer than.     

Parenting Narcissus: What Are the Links Between Parenting and Narcissism?

Previous theorizing by clinical psychologists suggests that adolescent narcissism may be related to parenting practices (Kernberg, 1975; Kohut, 1977). Two studies investigated the relations between parenting dimensions (i.e., warmth, monitoring, and psychological control) and narcissism both with and without removing from narcissism variance associated with trait self-esteem. Two hundred and twenty-two college students (Study 1) and 212 high school students (Study 2) completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a trait self-esteem scale, and standard measures of the three parenting dimensions. Parental warmth was associated positively and monitoring was associated negatively with both types of narcissism. Psychological control was positively associated with narcissism scores from which trait self-esteem variance had been removed. Clinical implications of the findings are discussed, limitations are addressed, and future research directions are suggested.     

Helping the Homeless: What About the Spirit of God?

This paper argues that the Holy Spirit is missing from services for the homeless. Spirituality is reviewed as a concept, and it is argued that the transforming Spirit that Paul described is not often present in discussions. Instead, the Social Gospel and Modernism have replaced the role of the Holy Spirit, and people who are homeless are being provided with very limited options to transform their lives and escape the desperation they so often feel.     

Ethics in medicine: Are we blind? In support of teaching medical ethics at the bedside

The ability to recognize and respond to the ethical dimension of medicine is integral to providing health care that is comprehensive and humane. However, this aspect of medical practice is underemphasized in clinical and academic medicine, despite attempts to devise curricula in this field. This paper examines the origins and consequences of this deficiency through a case history of a Jehovah's Witness who reluctantly accepted a blood transfusion. It emphasizes the ubiquity of the ethical context in medicine and argues that blindness to this context stems from the prevailing scientific and technological paradigm in medicine. Innovations in medical education are called for to enhance health care providers' abilities to appreciate and cope with these complex situations.     

On the Subjectivity of the Experience of Victory: Who Are the Election Winners?

Elections represent key moments in democratic countries, and an established finding from the existing literature is that winners of elections display higher levels of satisfaction with democracy. Yet we know almost nothing about the times when voters feel like winners of an election. Using panel data in four countries, this article finds that while the objective performance of the supported party—measured using vote share and changes in vote share from the previous election—has a very important effect on feeling like an election winner, prior expectations regarding the election’s outcome as well as preferences for the supported party significantly moderate the effect of party performance on voter feelings. It seems also that the identification of the winners and losers of elections are clearer in majoritarian‐style democracies than in proportional systems with coalition governments. Ultimately, the findings indicate that measuring who are the winners of an election using exclusively objective measures of party performance may provide a distorted view of public opinion following the elections.     

What Are the Brain Mechanisms on Which Psychological Processes Are Based?

ABSTRACT— That the human brain is the organ of the mind is not in dispute, but we know remarkably little about the brain mechanisms underlying the mind. What are the functional structures and computational processes of the human brain that subserve cognition, emotion, and behavior? Given the complexity of the human brain, progress in understanding the functional organization and structure of the human brain depends on sophisticated theoretical specifications of the psychological representations and processes that differentiate two or more comparison conditions. Psychological scientists, therefore, are well positioned to lead the search for brain mechanisms underlying psychological processes. Doing so constitutes an expansion of the purview of psychological science beyond a science of behavior, and beyond a science of the mind, to include a science of the brain. Such an expansion of the mission of psychological science has implications for the infrastructure and training needs of the discipline.