Anticipatory Governance: Bioethical Expertise for Human/Animal Chimeras

The pedigree chart is a cornerstone technology for producing bodies and value in livestock pure breeding. It organizes a cluster of processes, technologies, and discourses gathered under the rubric ‘pedigree practices’. Angus breeders commonly use artificial insemination to import performance ‘genetics’ into their herds, using the ‘expected progeny differences’ predicted by massive pedigree databases that now also contain phenotype data reported by cattle growers. Discourses of biological inheritance, good breeding, and pedigrees arose in the eighteenth century, concomitant with a fascination with races, species, and other biological kinds. A case study from Angus cattle breeding illustrates pedigree practices and the bodies made through them, showing how information and computing technologies, assisted reproductive technologies, and discourses of good breeding, purity, health, and disease leveraged a single bull and the two genetic diseases he carried into the pedigrees of up to 10% of the Angus herd. Technologies now widely used in human reproductive medicine were developed for use in livestock animals, especially cattle, extending a long relationship between cows and humans. While the development of these pedigree practices represents increased control over animal reproduction and bodies, it has also been instrumental in rendering all animal bodies, including human bodies, not only more technically but also more rhetorically available for reproductive interventions. These interventions may amplify anxieties about health, species, breed, and kin while also providing opportunities for contesting the boundaries of these nature–cultural categories.     

Biotechnology and legitimacy

Contested Technology: Ethics, Risk and Public Debate, edited by Rene von Schomberg, Tilburg: International Centre for Human and Public Affairs, 1995, £19/$29 pb.     

A Meta-Analysis of Ethics Instruction Effectiveness in the Sciences

Scholars have proposed a number of courses and programs intended to improve the ethical behavior of scientists in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the scientific enterprise. In the present study, we conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on 26 previous ethics program evaluation efforts, and the results showed that the overall effectiveness of ethics instruction was modest. The effects of ethics instruction, however, were related to a number of instructional program factors, such as course content and delivery methods, in addition to factors of the evaluation study itself, such as the field of investigator and criterion measure utilized. An examination of the characteristics contributing to the relative effectiveness of instructional programs revealed that more successful programs were conducted as seminars separate from the standard curricula rather than being embedded in existing courses. Furthermore, more successful programs were case based and interactive, and they allowed participants to learn and practice the application of real-world ethical decision-making skills. The implications of these findings for future course development and evaluation are discussed.     

Strategies in Forecasting Outcomes in Ethical Decision-Making: Identifying and Analyzing the Causes of the Problem

This study examined the role of key causal analysis strategies in forecasting and ethical decision-making. Undergraduate participants took on the role of the key actor in several ethical problems and were asked to identify and analyze the causes, forecast potential outcomes, and make a decision about each problem. Time pressure and analytic mindset were manipulated while participants worked through these problems. The results indicated that forecast quality was associated with decision ethicality, and the identification of the critical causes of the problem was associated with both higher quality forecasts and higher ethicality of decisions. Neither time pressure nor analytic mindset impacted forecasts or ethicality of decisions. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Dropping-in: the unexamined encounter

The paper seeks to initiate some discussion and debate on the widespread practice within Further Education and Higher Education counselling services of offering brief initial meetings to students during a 'walk in' hour. As counselling services with limited resources struggle to meet the challenge of increasing numbers and increasing severity of disturbance among the student population, this paper puts forward the view that nevertheless, cutting down on a full assessment session may not be the best response. While the author is aware of the considerable thought and ingenuity applied to this area by HE and FE colleagues, and the wide variety of practice which is emerging, the purpose of this paper is to focus specifically on the practice of the 'drop-in'. This term refers to an initial meeting which runs from anything between 5 minutes and half an hour, does not require a prior appointment and is differentiated in this paper from other responses such as emergency slots, duty hours or full initial assessment interviews. A further paper, in collaboration with colleagues from a number of different institutions, will aim to research the impact of a range of pre-assessment interventions on clients, counsellors, the counselling service and the institution. In the light of the generally brief counselling offered within the HE and FE setting, the generally late adolescent client group and the growing concern about student mental health, some clinical and service issues are explored. The paper then discusses the impact of the drop-in at the level of the institution, arguing that it has a powerful symbolic function, albeit in fantasy, of offering staff a quick solution to difficult-to-manage anxiety and distress. Going further, the suggestion is made that the arrival of the drop-in can be seen as part of a much wider unconscious attack on thinking that is taking place within educational institutions generally, where a place for the kind of thought and reflection offered by psychological therapies is being relentlessly squeezed out. A much fuller debate on the largely unexamined practice of the drop-in is called for.     

Questioning Our Questions: A Constructivist Technique for Clinical Supervision

Consistent themes in the constructivist supervision of counseling and psychotherapy include the fostering of supervisee reflexivity, perspective taking, and capacity to generate alternative conceptualizations and interventions. In keeping with these objectives, we describe a technique for deepening therapists' reflection on their interchanges with clients through “questioning their questions” and the clients' responses to them. We further illustrate the procedure in the supervision of a therapist in training who (a) analyzed in writing a series of six question-and-answer cycles pertaining to a client, (b) considered the larger implications of the interaction for the therapeutic relationship with this client, (c) received supervisory feedback on his journaling, and (d) offered a final reflexive comment on the procedure. We conclude with a few thoughts about variations on the technique to enhance its relevance in different supervisory settings.     

Limitations for Change Detection in Multiple Gabor Targets

We investigate the limitations on the ability to detect when a target has changed, using Gabor targets as simple quantifiable stimuli. Using a partial report technique to equalize response variables, we show that the log of the Weber fraction for detecting a spatial frequency change is proportional to the log of the number of targets, with a set-size effect that is greater than that reported for visual search. This is not a simple perceptual limitation, because pre-cueing a single target out of four restores performance to the level found when only one target is present. It is argued that the primary limitation on performance is the division of attention across multiple targets, rather than decay within visual memory. However in a simplified change detection experiment without cueing, where only one target of the set changed, not only was the set-size effect still larger, but it was greater at 2000 msec ISI than at 250 msec ISI, indicating a possible memory component. The steepness of the set-size effects obtained suggests that even moderate complexity of a stimulus in terms of number of component objects can overload attentional processes, suggesting a possible low-level mechanism for change blindness.     

Valence and vertical space: Saccade trajectory deviations reveal metaphorical spatial activation

Concepts of positive and negative valence are metaphorically structured in space (e.g., happy is up, sad is down). In fact, coupling a conceptual task (e.g., evaluating words as positive or negative) with a visuospatial task (e.g., identifying stimuli above or below fixation) often gives rise to metaphorical congruency effects. For instance, after reading a positive concept, visual target processing is facilitated above fixation. However, it is possible that tasks requiring upwards and downwards attentional orienting artificially strengthen the link between vertical space and semantic valence. For this reason, in the present study the vertical axis was uncoupled from the response axis. Participants made eye movements along the horizontal axis after reading positive or negative affect words, while their saccade movement trajectories were recorded. Based on previous research on saccade trajectory deviation, we predicted that fast saccade trajectories curve towards the salient segment of space, whereas slow saccade trajectories would curve away from the salient segment. Examining saccadic trajectories revealed a pattern of deviations along the vertical axis consistent with the metaphorical congruency account, although this pattern was mainly driven by positive concepts. These results suggest that semantic processing of valence can automatically recruit spatial features along the vertical axis.     

Associative retrieval processes in the human medial temporal lobe: hippocampal retrieval success and CA1 mismatch detection

Hippocampal subfields CA(3) and CA(1) are hypothesized to differentially support the generation of associative predictions and the detection of associative mismatches, respectively. Using high-resolution functional MRI, we examined hippocampal subfield activation during associative retrieval and during subsequent comparisons of memory to matching or mismatching decision probes. Activity in the dentate gyrus/CA(2/3), CA(1), and other medial temporal lobe subregions tracked associative retrieval success, whereas activity in CA(1) and the perirhinal cortex tracked the presence of associative mismatches. These data support the hypothesis that CA(1) acts as a "comparator," detecting when memory for the past and sensory input in the present diverge.