Legal Practices and the Reason of the Law

Legal argumentation, like argumentation generally, occurs against a background of shared understanding and competence. This view, inspired by Kuhn's understanding of scientific reasoning, is in stark contrast to more traditional rule-following accounts of legal argumentation. Below I consider reasons to reject the more traditional view of legal reasoning in favor of a roughly Kuhnian account of legal reasoning and conclude by raising skeptical questions about the cogency of legal reasoning when the tacitly accepted background conditions that make it possible are not critically examined.     

Guest Editor's Note

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Guest Editor's Note     

Predictors of Condom Use in Mexican Migrant Laborers

The purpose of this study was to explore predictors of condom use with occasional sex partners and regular sex partners, as well as carrying condoms in a new high-risk group for HIV infection, Mexican migrant laborers. This study extends previous findings by (1) exploring additional predictors not previously examined, (2) utilizing a large sample of male and female Mexican migrant laborers, (3) carefully controlling for the effects of various demographic and lifestyle variables related to condom use, and (4) assessing the interactive effects of gender on predictors of condom use. Snowball sampling was used to survey 501 adult Mexican migrant laborers. Results revealed that condom use with occasional sex partners was predicted by carrying condoms and condom self-efficacy and that women were more likely to use condoms with occasional partners when both men and women knew someone with HIV/AIDS. Condom use with regular sex partners was predicted by procondom social norms, less negative attitudes toward condoms, not knowing someone with HIV/AIDS, and condom self-efficacy. Carrying condoms was predicted by procondom social norms, less negative attitudes toward condoms, condom self-efficacy, worry about contracting HIV/AIDS, and women were more likely than men to carry condoms when both men and women were married. Understanding these findings, future research directions, and implications for condom promotion strategies with Mexican migrant laborers are discussed.     

Removing the shadow of suspicion: the effects of apology versus denial for repairing competence- versus integrity-based trust violations

Two studies were conducted to examine the implications of an apology versus a denial for repairing trust after an alleged violation. Results reveal that trust was repaired more successfully when mistrusted parties (a) apologized for violations concerning matters of competence but denied culpability for violations concerning matters of integrity, and (b) had apologized for violations when there was subsequent evidence of guilt but had denied culpability for violations when there was subsequent evidence of innocence. Supplementary analyses also revealed that the interactive effects of violation type and violation response on participants' trusting intentions were mediated by their trusting beliefs. Combined, these findings provide needed insight and supporting evidence concerning how trust might be repaired in the aftermath of a violation.     

Functional referents and acoustic similarity revisited: the case of Barbary macaque alarm calls

Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) utter "shrill barks" in response to disturbances in their surroundings. In some cases, the majority of group members react by running away or climbing up a tree. In many other instances, however, group members show no overt reaction to these calls. We conducted a series of playback experiments to identify the factors underlying subjects' responses. We presented calls given in response to dogs that had elicited escape responses and calls that had failed to do so. We also presented calls given in response to snakes and to the observer approaching the sleeping-trees at night. An acoustic analysis of the calls presented in the playback experiments (electronic supplementary material, audioclip S1) revealed significant differences among calls given in response to dogs, the observer approaching at night, and snakes. However, the analysis did not detect any differences between calls given in response to dogs that were related to whether or not they had elicited escape responses in the first place. Correspondingly, after playback of calls given in response to dogs, we observed no difference in subjects' responses in relation to whether or not the calls had initially elicited escape responses. Subjects showed startle or escape responses significantly more often after playbacks of calls given in response to dogs than after calls given in response to observers. Playbacks of calls given in response to snakes failed to elicit specific responses such as standing bipedally or scanning the grass. Although these findings may imply that responses depend on the external referent, they also indicate that there is no clear-cut relationship between the information available to the listeners and their subsequent responses. This insight forces us to extend current approaches to identifying the meaning of animal signals. Accepted after revision: 15 May 2001 Electronic Publication     

Effekte regionaler Psychosomatiktherapiemodule

Psychosomatics from the perspective of medicine assumes that somatic, psychological, and social aspects must always be taken into consideration. By combining psychosomatic and psychiatric care in community psychiatric/psychosomatic networks, existing structures can be used and costs decreased due to synergies (best point of treatment). Using a 1?year pre-/postcatamnesis comparison of 106 patients, it was possible to determine the cost of the 3?week psychosomatic treatment with respect to the medical, sociotherapeutic, and psychotherapeutic treatment effects and how long it helped. Based on the results, inpatient intensive therapy of psychosomatic illnesses in regional psychiatric departments of general hospitals can be recommended as a future treatment option – taking into account that patient-related factors can predict treatment success.     

Eye Movements Reveal Mental Looking Through Time

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The MR2: A multi-racial,mega-resolution database of facial stimuli

Faces impart exhaustive information about their bearers, and are widely used as stimuli in psychological research. Yet many extant facial stimulus sets have substantially less detail than faces encountered in real life. In this paper, we describe a new database of facial stimuli, the Multi-Racial Mega-Resolution database (MR2). The MR2 includes 74 extremely high resolution images of European, African, and East Asian faces. This database provides a high-quality, diverse, naturalistic, and well-controlled facial image set for use in research. The MR2 is available under a Creative Commons license, and may be accessed online.