Australian lawyers' views on competency issues in older adults

Lawyers are often called upon by their older clients to draft contracts, make up wills or powers of attorney, or provide other forms of legal advice or service. With the increasing numbers of older people in the population, the numbers of older clients for legal practitioners is likely to increase. Older people are also at increased risk for impaired cognitive processes that can affect their ability to make reasoned judgements in civil contracts and other legal arrangements. Here we report on the results of a survey of 302 Australian solicitors as to their experience and practices in determining the capacity of older clients to make legal decisions. The responses, reflecting a 20.7% return rate, showed a wide range of experience in conducting capacity assessments, with a mean of 15.7 years (SD = 10.59). There was a very wide range of practices in determining capacity with no consensus. The most frequent form of questions older clients were asked related to personal and family history. Less than one-quarter asked for the rationale of the decision: the most appropriate form of question in the literature. The results suggest a need for further training of solicitors in the assessment of the capacity of older clients to make legal decisions.     

Aesthetic Truth and Pastoral Theology: A Proposal for a New Method of Reflection and Practice

Pastoral theology needs to clarify its identity as an autonomous theological discipline by developing its own knowledge base, body of research, and practice methods. It needs to broaden its scope to include not only a concern for personal issues, but also larger sociocultural and anthropological ones as well. Additionally, there is a pressing need for moving beyond the confines of traditional methods of correlation. This essay offers a new method for pastoral theological reflection and practice that is grounded in Hans-Georg Gadamer's understanding of aesthetic truth and hermeneutics. It offers a new way of conceptualizing the relationship of pastoral theology to such conversation partners as the Bible and theological tradition, the social sciences, and practical wisdom, demonstrating how these can contribute to the pastoral theological task.     

Effects of concreteness and semantic relatedness on composite imagery ratings and cued recall

Day and Bellezza (1983) rejected a dual coding imagery explanation for the superior recall of concrete words because unrelated concrete pairs were rated lower in composite imagery but were still remembered better than related abstract pairs. We show that dual coding theory explains their results and our new findings using the same paradigm. In Experiment 1, 120 subjects rated imagery or relatedness for 108 pairs that varied in concreteness, pair relatedness, and associative strength. Incidental cued recall followed. Relatedness and strength affected imagery ratings, as did concreteness, and very low relatedness partly accounted for the low composite imagery ratings for unrelated concrete pairs. Concreteness and relatedness also affected recall, and suporior recall for unrelated concrete pairs occurred consistently under imagery but not under relatedness instructions. In Experiment 2, 40 subjects rated imagery value and recalled 24 pairs. Subsequent questioning indicated that composite images were retrieved better given stimuli from unrelated concrete than from related abstract pairs. These findings and Day and Bellezza’s original results are explained in terms of (1) imaginal and verbal associative processes, which jointly influence composite imagery ratings and recall, and (2) the critical role of stimulus concreteness during image retrieval and recall (i.e., the conceptual peg hypothesis).     

An Associative Interpretation of the Indirect McCollough Effect

Following an induction procedure in which a coloured grid is alternated with a square of a complementary colour, subjects report colour after-effects on both the grid orientation present during induction and the orthogonal non-induced grid orientation. The after-effect reported on the induced grid orientation is called the McCollough effect (ME). The aftereffect reported on the non-induced grid orientation is called the indirect ME. There is evidence that the ME represents an instance of Pavlovian conditioning. The present results support a conditioning interpretation of the indirect ME and are inconsistent with interpretations of the indirect ME that attribute the phenomenon to special orthogonal coding mechanisms within the visual system.     

Nonlinear and Nonmonotonic Effects of Outcome on Procedural and Distributive Fairness Judgments1

It has generally been assumed that increases in the concrete outcomes of a procedure will result in judgments of greater procedural and distributive fairness, but research on this topic has been inconsistent. Using a classic procedural justice paradigm (Walker, LaTour, Lind, &. Thibaut, 1974), the experiment tested the effects of four levels of outcome. Forty-eight male and female undergraduates were led to believe that their team had been wrongfully charged with cheating in a business simulation game. An adversary adjudication was held, purportedly to resolve the charge. The outcome of the adjudication was confiscation of all, two thirds, one third, or none of the subject's monetary winnings from the game. Both procedural and distributive fairness measures showed dear nonlinear outcome effects. The relationship between outcomes and both fairness measures showed some evidence of being nonmonotonic as well: A two-thirds loss resulted in less favorable reactions than did a total loss. Ratings on other scales suggest that the nonlinear effects are due to beliefs that the judge did not fully consider the evidence in the two-thirds loss and one-third loss conditions. The discussion focuses on the theoretical implications of the findings for procedural justice and social exchange processes and the practical implications for conflict resolution procedure.     

Perceiving a calling, living a calling, and job satisfaction: testing a moderated, multiple mediator model

The current study examined the relation between perceiving a calling, living a calling, and job satisfaction among a diverse group of employed adults who completed an online survey (N = 201). Perceiving a calling and living a calling were positively correlated with career commitment, work meaning, and job satisfaction. Living a calling moderated the relations of perceiving a calling with career commitment and work meaning, such that these relations were more robust for those with a stronger sense they were living their calling. Additionally, a moderated, multiple mediator model was run to examine the mediating role of career commitment and work meaning in the relation of perceiving a calling and job satisfaction, while accounting for the moderating role of living a calling. Results indicated that work meaning and career commitment fully mediated the relation between perceiving a calling and job satisfaction. However, the indirect effects of work meaning and career commitment were only significant for individuals with high levels of living a calling, indicating the importance of living a calling in the link between perceiving a calling and job satisfaction. Implications for research and practice are discussed.