Perception of Organizational Ethical Climate by University Staff and Students in Medicine and Humanities: A Cross Sectional Study

Science and Engineering Ethics - We assessed students’ and employees’ perception of ethical climate at a university school of medicine compared to that of social sciences and...     

Family etiology of chronic pain

The existence of family etiology of chronic pain is at present generally accepted as valid. Some family-related features are commonly witnessed in these patients. Pain patients are often raised by indifferent or abusing parents, submitted to parental pain models and taught a somatic vocabulary to label their emotions.They are rewarded for pain-behaviors. They communicate principally through illness, pain and complaints. Their familial status rests on the maintenance of the sick role.     

Nonregulation of food intake in restrained,emotional, and external eaters

In the present study, regulation of ice cream intake after a preload was examined in 20 high and 20 low scorers (median split) on subscales of the Restraint Scale (RS) (Herman, Polivy, Pliner, Threshold, & Munic, 1978) and the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) (van Strien, 1986). For each subscale it was hypothesized that low scorers would regulate their ice cream intake. High scorers on disinhibitive scales (i.e., the RS and the DEBQ-emotional and -external subscales) were expected to counterregulate after a preload. In contrast, high scorers on the inhibitive DEBQ-restraint scale were expected to regulate their ice cream intake. A robust effect was found: high scorers never regulated ice cream intake after a preload on either the disinhibitive or the inhibitive scales, while low scorers always did. For the RS a significant interaction effect was found [F(1,39)=4.97, p=.03]. None of the other subscales showed interaction effects. The t tests showed that low scorers on all subscales ate significantly less after a preload than without one, while high scorers on all subscales did not differ in intake after a preload or without one. This nonregulation appears to be characteristic of people preoccupied with caloric intake, regardless of the content of the preoccupation.     

Safe and Unsafe Sexual Intentions and Behavior: The Effects of Norms and Attitudes1

A study of 85 heterosexual men, 85 heterosexual women, and 82 homosexual men was undertaken to examine the variables that influence intentions to engage in different sexual practices and actual sexual behavior. On the basis of Fishbein and Ajzen's (1975) theory of reasoned action, it was predicted that the strength of intentions would be related to whether behavior was in accord with intentions. Consistent with expectations, the strength of intention to engage in six different sexual practices (e. g., vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, oral sex) and the three strategies that modify the risk of HIV transmission (sex with an exclusive partner, sex wearing a condom, and looking for a new partner) predicted actual behavior. Second, it was proposed that attitudes toward one's sexual practices and norms would be related to intentions to engage in safe sex. To reflect differential levels in the safety of behavioral intentions, five safety intention groups were formed: (a) nonpenetrative sex, (b) penetrative sex in an exclusive relationship with a condom, (c) penetrative sex in an exclusive relationship without a condom, (d) penetrative sex in a nonexclusive relationship with a condom, and (e) penetrative sex in a nonexclusive relationship without a condom. Norms, rather than attitudes, distinguished the five safety intention groups. the groups intending to engage in safe sex (nonpenetrative sex or penetrative sex with a condom) perceived lower levels of social approval for their sexual practices than the noncondom groups. Additional analyses showed that past behavior had a stabilizing effect on the intention-behavior relationship, but only for the nonpenetrative and noncondom safety intention groups.     

A developmental investigation of selective attention to graphic,phonetic, and semantic information in words

Second and fifth-grade and college-age subjects made similarity judgments on sets of three words that required attention to orthographic, phonetic, or semantic information. Accuracy and speed increased with age. Even the youngest subjects were able to perform the task of selecting a given feature of a word reasonably well. Differences in difficulty among the three tasks decreased with age, suggesting a developmental change (primarily between second and fifth grade) toward facility in extracting phonetic and semantic information from words. The presence of confusable, potentially relevant information had detrimental effects overall which decreased with age and varied with the type of task and type of distractor. For all ages, performance was better when all trials of a particular task were blocked together than when trials of the three tasks were randomly ordered.