Index of suspicion: feeling not believing

Throughout the U.S., state laws require professionals who work with children to report cases of suspected child abuse to child protection services. Both practically and conceptually, however, significant problems arise from a lack of clarity regarding the threshold that has been set for reporting. Specifically, there is no consensus as to what constitutes reasonable suspicion, and little direction for how mandated reporters should gauge their legal and professional responsibilities when they harbor suspicion. In this paper we outline the context of the problem, discuss the nature and scope of its conceptual underpinnings, and offer recommendations for moving towards a concrete, practical solution.     

Senior capstone design and ethics: A bridge to the professional world

A senior level capstone design experience has been developed and offered with a particular emphasis on many of the professional issues raised in Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criterion IV. The course has sought to develop student awareness of the ethical foundation of the engineering profession, the global and societal framework within which engineers practice, and the environmental impact on engineering. The capstone design course also focused upon improving the technical communications skills of the graduating senior class with both extensive instruction in writing and multiple workshops dealing with the art of making an effective oral presentation. The effectiveness of the design course was assessed using Kirkpatrick’s model for evaluating training programs. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

Multiply controlled verbal operants: an analysis and extension to the picture exchange communication system

This paper presents Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior as a framework for understanding language acquisition in children with autism. We describe Skinner's analysis of pure and impure verbal operants and illustrate how this analysis may be applied to the design of communication training programs. The picture exchange communication system (PECS) is a training program influenced by Skinner's framework. We describe the training sequence associated with PECS and illustrate how this sequence may establish multiply controlled verbal behavior in children with autism. We conclude with an examination of how Skinner's framework may apply to other communication modalities and training strategies.     

A function of form: terror management and structuring the social world

Drawing on lay epistemology theory, the authors assessed a terror management analysis of the psychological function of structuring social information. Seven studies tested variations of the hypothesis that simple, benign interpretations of social information function, in part, to manage death-related anxiety. In Studies 1-4, mortality salience (MS) exaggerated primacy effects and reliance on representative information, decreased preference for a behaviorally inconsistent target among those high in personal need for structure (PNS), and increased high-PNS participants' preference for interpersonal balance. In Studies 5-7, MS increased high-PNS participants' preference for interpretations that suggest a just world and a benevolent causal order of events in the social world.     

Perceptions of Ethical Behaviour among Business Faculty in Canada

Faculty members at Canadian business schools were surveyed regarding their ethical perceptions of behaviours related to undergraduate instruction. Fifty-five behavioural statements were listed and respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they felt each behaviour was ethical or unethical. The only item that respondents endorsed as unequivocally unethical (90% indicated it was definitely unethical) was Becoming sexually involved with an undergraduate in one of your classes. We also compared the results of our sample to those of an American sample. Overall, an interesting pattern of differences emerged between the responses obtained in Canada and the U.S. In general, the direction of the significant differences was such that Canadian professors viewed the behaviours in question as less ethical than did their American counterparts.     

Now you feel it, now you don't: frontal brain electrical asymmetry and individual differences in emotion regulation

Recent theoretical accounts of emotion regulation assign an important role in this process to the prefrontal cortex, yet there is little relevant data available to support this hypothesis. The current study assessed the relation between individual differences in asymmetric prefrontal activation and an objective measure of uninstructed emotion regulation. Forty-seven participants 57 to 60 years old viewed emotionally arousing and neutral visual stimuli while eyeblink startle data were collected. Startle probes were also presented after picture presentation to capture the persistence or attenuation of affect following the offset of an emotional stimulus. Subjects with greater relative left-sided anterior activation in scalp-recorded brain electrical signals displayed attenuated startle magnitude after the offset of negative stimuli. This relation between resting frontal activation and recovery following an aversive event supports the idea of a frontally mediated mechanism involved in one form of automatic emotion regulation.     

The neural basis of autobiographical and semantic memory: new evidence from three PET studies

A novel, neuropsychologically informed paradigm (extended retrieval of events in response to a cue word) was used to investigate the neural basis of autobiographical and semantic memory. Contrasting retrieval of autobiographical memories with retrieval of semantic facts (ABM-SEM) in 24 subjects across three PET studies revealed bilateral involvement of the middle temporal gyrus (BA 21) and medial frontal cortex (BA 9/10). The opposite contrast, SEM-ABM, resulted in increased regional cerebral blood flow in left posterior temporal regions (BA 37) and left prefrontal cortex (BA 45/46). Laterality maps suggest that the bilateral pattern seen in our studies, but not often in other neuroimaging investigations, reflects the use of a task stressing retrieval of specific personal events. Further comparisons revealed that the activation in the right anterior temporal lobe during autobiographical recall was virtually identical to that seen during retrieval of information about famous people or events in contrast with retrieval of general semantic facts. These findings suggest that the retrieval of an autobiographical event requires participation from conceptual knowledge, and that this type of knowledge is bilaterally distributed in the temporal lobes.     

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus–response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus–response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus–response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar’s point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants’ sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar’s perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.     

The anatomy of auditory word processing: individual variability

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural substrate underlying the processing of single words, comparing activation patterns across subjects and within individuals. In a word repetition task, subjects repeated single words aloud with instructions not to move their jaws. In a control condition involving reverse speech, subjects heard a digitally reversed speech token and said aloud the word "crime." The averaged fMRI results showed activation in the left posterior temporal and inferior frontal regions and in the supplementary motor area, similar to previous PET studies. However, the individual subject data revealed variability in the location of the temporal and frontal activation. Although these results support previous imaging studies, demonstrating an averaged localization of auditory word processing in the posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG), they are more consistent with traditional neuropsychological data, which suggest both a typical posterior STG localization and substantial individual variability. By using careful head restraint and movement analysis and correction methods, the present study further demonstrates the feasibility of using overt articulation in fMRI experiments.     

Incidental learning of real-world regularities

The large literature on incidental learning relies almost exclusively on laboratory experiments. Whenever researchers have attempted to demonstrate incidental learning of real-world regularities, they have typically failed to show learning. For example, it is well established that people do not learn regularities in everyday objects, such as the left-right orientation of faces on coins, despite a very large exposure to them. In this report, we examine this apparent contradiction. We argue that most studies exploring real-life incidental learning use tests that are not as sensitive to low-confidence information as those traditionally used in laboratory tasks. Using more sensitive measures, we show that it is possible to learn regularities from British and Japanese cultural life as a direct result of exposure to these regularities. Further, confidence measures suggest that although the information may be acquired incidentally, it can be expressed with and without concomitant awareness of that knowledge.