Fans,Crimes and Misdemeanors: Fandom and the Ethics of Love

The Journal of Ethics - Is it permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally? While this issue has recently been the subject of widespread public debate, it has...     

The phonotactic influence on the perception of a consonant cluster /pt/ by native English and native Polish listeners: A behavioral and event related potential (ERP) study

The effect of exposure to the contextual features of the /pt/ cluster was investigated in native-English and native-Polish listeners using behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) methodology. Both groups experience the /pt/ cluster in their languages, but only the Polish group experiences the cluster in the context of word onset examined in the current experiment. The /st/ cluster was used as an experimental control. ERPs were recorded while participants identified the number of syllables in the second word of nonsense word pairs. The results found that only Polish listeners accurately perceived the /pt/ cluster and perception was reflected within a late positive component of the ERP waveform. Furthermore, evidence of discrimination of /pt/ and /p?t/ onsets in the neural signal was found even for non-native listeners who could not perceive the difference. These findings suggest that exposure to phoneme sequences in highly specific contexts may be necessary for accurate perception.     

Family therapy vs. parent groups: Effects on adolescent drug abusers

Abstract

The families of adolescent drug abuse clients who were admitted to six outpatient drug-free (OPDF) treatment programs were randomly assigned to either a family therapy method or a parent group method. It was later found that in 93% of the family therapy families, one or both parents participated (N=85); but that in only 67% of the families assigned to a parent group did one or both parents participate (N=50). This is considered to be an important practical advantage for family therapy. At follow-up evaluation 15 months later (after a 6-month course of treatment and a 9-month follow-up period), the clients and their mothers in both groups reported significant improvement on numerous outcome criteria, including reduction in substance use. There was no significant difference between the two groups in degree of improvement.     

Emotional Experience and Facial Expression in Alzheimer's Disease

ABSTRACT

Emotional experiences and facial muscle activity of individuals with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) (n = 13) and healthy elderly control subjects (n = 21) were measured while viewing emotion-eliciting images. Alzheimer's disease and control groups rated their emotional experiences similarly and in the expected directions on dimensions of valence and arousal. Change in corrugator activity while viewing images, compared to baseline, was comparable across groups and was greatest while viewing negative images. Change in zygomatic activity, however, was significantly different between AD and control groups, with AD subjects demonstrating an inverted pattern of activity compared to controls. These findings are discussed as possible consequences of frontal cortical system involvement accompanying the disease process.     

School and community participation of in-school teenagers affected by orphanhood in a rural South Africa setting

This study investigated schooling and community participation qualities of teenage learners affected by orphanhood in rural secondary South African setting. Participants were a purposive sample of 30 teenage learners, (female = 60% black = 98%, 12 to 19 years old). Data on their school and community participation were collected using semi-structured individual interviews. The data were thematically analyzed with open-coding. The findings indicated that learners need support for livelihoods, relationship development with extended family or guardians, school attendance, school task engagement and follow through. They experienced material shortages despite state support. From livelihood deprivations and forced opportunities, the learners who had been orphaned enter the working environment earlier than is typical and often do menial jobs.

Children who have been orphaned are those under the age of 18 years who have lost one or both parents from any cause (Jeff & Chris, 2002 Jeff, G., & Chris, D. (2002). Impacts and interventions. South Africa: University of Natal Press. [Google Scholar], UNICEF, 2003). This represents about 18.8% of South African children (3 374 971) and 7.3% of children (24 6373) from the Free State or central province of South Africa alone (Central Statistics South Africa, 2011). According to the World Bank (1998 World Bank. (1998). Confronting AIDS. Washington, DC: World Bank. [Google Scholar]), children affected by orphanhood are less likely to have proper schooling from lack of parenting and the resource deprivation associated with being orphaned. Under guardianship, the host family may reduce a child's attendance at school by labour demands or the inability to pay for schooling (UNICEF, 2003). From these deprivations, learners affected by orphanhood may enter the labour force prematurely, and mostly in the unregulated informal sector (UNICEF, 2012). As a matter of fact, a learner who is orphaned is deprived of childhood from the socio-economic demands on him or her which are developmentally atypical (Ganga & Maphala, 2013).     

Ethical social justice: Do the ends justify the means?

This article offers an ethical decision‐making model, informed by community psychology values, as a means for guiding psychologists when engaging in social justice‐oriented work. The applicability of this model is demonstrated through a case analysis elucidating how America's psychologists individually and collectively arrived at the decision to endorse torture—ostensibly as a means for preventing terrorism. Critics have wondered how the American Psychological Association succumbed to these involvements, and how to prevent such ethical lapses in the future. Unfortunately, the American Psychological Association's ethical codes fail to provide explicit guidance for psychologists' involvement in social justice work that impacts communities and systems. To address this gap, we present a values‐driven, ethical decision‐making framework that may be used to guide psychologists' future practices. This framework infuses fundamental community psychology values (i.e., caring and compassion; health; self‐determination and participation, human diversity, social justice; and critical reflexivity) into a 9‐step model.     

Aesthetic judgements and motivation

Are aesthetic judgements cognitive, belief-like states or non-cognitive, desire-like states? There have been a number of attempts in recent years to evaluate the plausibility of a non-cognitivist theory of aesthetic judgements. These attempts borrow heavily from non-cognitivism in metaethics. One argument that is used to support metaethical non-cognitivism is the argument from Motivational Judgement Internalism. It is claimed that accepting this view, together with a plausible theory of motivation, pushes us towards accepting non-cognitivism. A tempting option, then, for those wishing to defend aesthetic non-cognitivism, would be to appeal to a similar argument. However, both Caj Strandberg and Walter Sinnott-Armstong have argued that Internalism is a less plausible claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements by raising objections against aesthetic internalism. In this paper, I will argue that both of these objections can be raised against internalism about moral judgements as well. As a result, internalism is no less plausible a claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements. I will then show how a theory of internalism about normative judgements in general is capable of avoiding both of these objections.     

The role of animacy in spatial transformations

We present evidence that different mental spatial transformations are used to reason about three different types of items representing a spectrum of animacy: human bodies, nonhuman animals, and inanimate objects. Participants made two different judgments about rotated figures: handedness judgments (“Is this the left or right side?”) and matching judgments (“Are these figures the same?”). Perspective-taking strategies were most prevalent when participants made handedness judgments about human bodies and animals. In contrast, participants generally did not imagine changes in perspective to perform matching judgments. Such results suggest that high-level information about semantic categories, including information about a thing’s animacy, can influence how spatial representations are transformed when performing online problem solving. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.