Medical school oath-taking: the moral controversy

Professions typically formulate codes of ethics. Medical students are exposed to various codes and often are expected to recite some code or oath at their graduation. This article reports the findings of a study of one large medical class, asked upon entry to medical school and again at the beginning of their fourth term, which of 13 specified professional, religious, and secular codes of ethics they would turn to for moral guidance in their practice of medicine. The study finds great diversity in the students' choices and no clear pattern of change by their fourth term. Very few students chose the oath they would be asked to recite at their graduation. The article probes the problems this creates for school administrators and professors as well as students. It asks the implications for professional oath-taking at graduation and in the practice of the profession.     

Ethics in the Humanities: Findings from Focus Groups

This project examined the ethical issues faced by academics and professionals in the Humanities. We conducted focus groups to gather information about the ethical concerns in these fields and used the qualitative data arising from the discussions to create a taxonomy that represents the structure of ethical issues in the Humanities. A key implication of our findings is that while the focus of ethics research and interventions has been primarily on the sciences and engineering, academics and professionals in other fields also encounter some unique critical ethical dilemmas that require further research and methods of intervention.     

Creatio Ex Nihilo: A FieldOriented Approach

Abstract :  Process‐oriented thinkers complain that the classical understanding of the God‐world relationship is inherently dualistic. Instead they propose a model of the God‐world relationship based on the soul‐body analogy. Yet this seems to compromise the freedom of God vis‐à‐vis creation and the notion of God as Trinity. The author suggests a new approach to the God‐world relationship based on a modified understanding of "societies" within the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead: namely, "societies" as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions. The three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in this way first co‐constitute an unbounded field of activity or "space" for their own dynamic interrelation within the divine being. Then within this "space" by their conjoint free decision the persons of the Trinity gradually bring into existence the entire world of creation understood as a hierarchically ordered set of subfields corresponding to individual entities (inanimate and animate) and the "systems"(environments, communities) into which they are aggregated. Since fields can be thus interlayered and yet remain basically independent of one another in their ongoing existence and activity, God is not thereby identified with the world nor the world collapsed into God. But the divine persons and all their creatures still share in different ways one and the same communitarian life.     

Simulating social interaction to address deficits of autistic spectrum disorder in children.

Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is diagnosed on the basis of impairment in reciprocal social interaction and language, and rigidity of behavior. This brief paper describes the development of an experimental intervention for preschool children newly diagnosed with ASD. The rationale for this intervention is the hypothesis that failure to attend to social cues in very early life, of itself, may bear a large share of responsibility for core social and communicative deficits. The intervention, therefore, uses eye-tracking to monitor and trigger rewards for attention to facial expression and direction of gaze.     

Intimate partner violence and preschoolers' explicit memory functioning.

This research examines whether parents' intimate partner physical violence (IPV) relates to their preschoolers' explicit memory functioning, whether children's symptoms of hyperarousal mediate this relation, and whether mothers' positive parenting moderates this relation. Participants were 69 mothers and their 4- or 5-year-old child (34 girls). Mothers completed measures of IPV, children's hyperarousal symptoms, parent-child aggression, and positive parenting. Measures of explicit memory functioning were administered to preschoolers. As expected, IPV correlated negatively with preschoolers' performance on explicit memory tasks, even after controlling for parent-child aggression and demographic variables related to preschoolers' memory functioning. Preschoolers' hyperarousal symptoms did not mediate the relation between IPV and explicit memory functioning, but mothers' positive parenting moderated this relation. Specifically, the negative relation between IPV and preschoolers' performance on 2 of the 3 explicit memory tasks was weaker when mothers engaged in higher levels of positive parenting. These findings extend research on IPV and children's adjustment difficulties to explicit memory functioning in preschoolers and suggest that mothers can ameliorate the influence of IPV on preschoolers' memory functioning via their parenting.     

Evaluation of the psychometric properties of the developmental coordination disorder questionnaire for parents (DCD-Q): results from a community based study of school-aged children

In this study, we examine several key psychometric properties (reliability, construct validity, concurrent validity) of the Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire (DCD-Q) using a large, school-based sample of children (n=523) and their parents. Children completed the Children's Self-perceptions of Adequacy in and Predilection toward Physical Activity (CSAPPA) and parents completed the DCD-Q. The internal reliability of the DCD-Q was high for both the full scale and the subscales. Confirmatory factor analysis established that the scale was multifactorial, but the fit of the hypothesized factor structure was poor. Finally, moderate correlations were observed between the CSAPPA and the DCD-Q, with the strongest correlation found between the "perceived adequacy" subscale of the CSAPPA and "control during movement" subscale of the DCD-Q. Implications for screening and further research are discussed in relation to both instruments.     

Spatial reasoning with external visualizations: what matters is what you see, not whether you interact

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and compared participants who were allowed interactive control of the visualization to those who were not allowed control. In Experiment 1, interactivity produced better performance than passive viewing, but the advantage of interactivity disappeared in Experiment 2 when visual input for the two conditions in a yoked design was equalized. In Experiments 2 and 3, differences in how interactive participants manipulated the visualization were large and related to performance. In Experiment 3, non-interactive participants who watched optimal movements of the display performed as well as interactive participants who manipulated the visualization effectively and better than interactive participants who manipulated the visualization ineffectively. Spatial ability made an independent contribution to performance on the spatial reasoning task, but did not predict patterns of interactive behavior. These experiments indicate that providing participants with active control of a computer visualization does not necessarily enhance task performance, whereas seeing the most task-relevant information does, and this is true regardless of whether the task-relevant information is obtained actively or passively.