Death in Hospital: The Place of Religion in the Care of the Patient

The reflections in this article are based on my experience over the past ten years as hospital chaplain of a large district general hospital within the UK National Health Service. I realize the limitations of this experience, but I hope that I may achieve some insights that have a wider application. I attempt to bring my hospital experience into a creative relationship with other aspects of my life, which include a commitment to Christian–Muslim dialogue, and a background of life and work in the Middle East, where I worked for the Anglican Church in Lebanon and Syria from 1973 until 1982.     

Psychopathy and aggression: Examining the role of psychopathy factors in predicting laboratory aggression under hostile and instrumental conditions

Psychopathy is a problematic configuration of traits and behaviors that is consistently correlated with aggressive, criminal behavior. Studies have suggested that psychopathy is composed of related but distinct factors that manifest divergent relations with a host of constructs including aggression. In the current study, we used a sample of 126 men to examine whether these psychopathy factors are differentially related to aggression manifested in two conditions (instrumental and hostile/reactive aggression) of a laboratory aggression paradigm. Traits related to an antagonistic interpersonal style and emotional detachment (i.e., Factor 1) were related to aggression in both conditions whereas traits related to negative emotionality, impulsivity, and an antagonistic style (i.e., Factor 2) were related to aggression only in the hostile/reactive condition. Potential explanations for these findings are put forth.     

Effect of trait anger on cognitive processing of emotional stimuli

In the present experiment, the authors examined whether trait anger was associated with cognitive biases for anger-related semantic stimuli. Fifty-two undergraduate students completed the Trait Anger Scale (TAS; C. D. Spielberger, G. Jacobs, S. Russell, & R. Crane, 1983), and those reporting TAS scores in the upper (n = 17) or lower (n = 13) quartiles of the sample were assigned to high- and low-anger groups, respectively. The 30 participants then engaged in a lexical decision task that presented various emotion words, neutral words, and nonwords. Results indicated that individuals who reported high levels of trait anger displayed facilitative biases in the processing of semantic anger-related stimuli. This predisposition to more readily process anger-related information may underlie their propensity to experience intense feelings of anger when provoked.     

The Health Professional Ethics Rubric: Practical Assessment in Ethics Education for Health Professional Schools

A barrier to the development and refinement of ethics education in and across health professional schools is that there is not an agreed upon instrument or method for assessment in ethics education. The most widely used ethics education assessment instrument is the Defining Issues Test (DIT) I & II. This instrument is not specific to the health professions. But it has been modified for use in, and influenced the development of other instruments in, the health professions. The DIT contains certain philosophical assumptions (??Kohlbergian?? or ??neo-Kohlbergian??) that have been criticized in recent years. It is also expensive for large institutions to use. The purpose of this article is to offer a rubric??which the authors have named the Health Professional Ethics Rubric??for the assessment of several learning outcomes related to ethics education in health science centers. This rubric is not open to the same philosophical critiques as the DIT and other such instruments. This rubric is also practical to use. This article includes the rubric being advocated, which was developed by faculty and administrators at a large academic health science center as a part of a campus-wide ethics education initiative. The process of developing the rubric is described, as well as certain limitations and plans for revision.     

Ethical challenges in the COVID-19 research context: a toolkit for supporting analysis and resolution

ABSTRACTCOVID-19 is compromising all aspects of society, with devastating impacts on health, political, social, economic and educational spheres. A premium is being placed on scientific research as the source of possible solutions, with a situational imperative to carry out investigations at an accelerated rate. There is a major challenge not to neglect ethical standards, in a context where doing so may mean the difference between life and death. In this paper we offer a rubric for considering the ethical challenges in COVID-19 related research, in the form of an ethics toolkit for global research developed at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with more than 200 global researchers from around the world. This toolkit provides a framework to support confrontation of ethical conflicts through the integrated and iterative analysis of Place, People, Principles and Precedents, throughout the research journey. Two case analyses are offered to exemplify the utility of the toolkit as a flexible and dynamic tool to promote ethical research in the context of COVID-19.     

Pascal’s Wager: a Reason to Hesitate

Philosophia - One version of Pascal’s Wager says we should commit to, or cultivate belief in, whatever religion we think is most likely to bring us eternal joy. I pose a reductio for this...     

Analytic flexibility in laboratory aggression paradigms: Relations with personality traits vary (slightly) by operationalization of aggression

Competitive reaction time tasks (CRTTs) have been used widely in social science research, but recent criticism has been directed at the flexible quantification strategies used with this methodology. A recent review suggests that over 150 different quantification strategies have been used in this literature, and there is evidence to suggest that different operationalizations can affect the results and interpretations of experiments using CRTTs. In the current investigation, we reanalyze data from four existing samples from two different sites (total N = 600) to examine how the relations between a range of personality traits and aggression vary based on how aggression is operationalized. Our results suggest that there is a modest degree of heterogeneity in effect size and direction for these relations, and that effect size and direction were most consistent for traits more generally related to lab aggression (e.g., psychopathy, low Five-Factor Model agreeableness). In addition, profile matching analyses suggest that different operationalizations yield empirical correlates that are quite similar to one another, even when quantifying absolute rather than relative similarity. These results were consistent across site, methodology, and type of sample, suggesting that these issues are likely generalizable across most labs using CRTTs. We conclude with suggestions for future directions, particularly emphasizing the need for adequately-powered samples, and for researchers to preregister a plan for how CRTT data will be analyzed.