“Be True to Your School”: An Open Letter to Students and Practitioners of Human Science Research

This editorial discusses some of the challenges that we face in striving toward being shepherds of our discipline, as well as toward “being original.” The question is how to make an original contribution to the field while following in the footsteps of one's forbearers. Many researchers (and even research mentors) have a desire to carve out their own place in the field, and doing so often means emphasizing what is new and different about their approach. Shepherding, however, means bearing the weight together, participating in the spirit of a “we phenomenon,” or more simply, being a team player. As psychologists climbing our individual career ladders while working together toward a common goal, the challenge is being true to yourself and to your “school” of fellow researchers. This means being faithful and acknowledging toward the community, including one's peers, one's former mentors, and the seminal thinkers whose work inspires one's own. When writing up research, we therefore should to be attuned to the possibility of communicating our pedigree more faithfully—a challenge that calls upon us to remember the ground from which we, ourselves, spring forth.     

Some Antiepileptic Compounds Impair Learning by Rats in a Morris Water Maze

In the present experiments, we investigated the effects of several commonly employed antiepileptic drugs on the performance of adult rats in a Morris water maze task. We found that phenytoin treatment produced the most deleterious performance impairments across all days of training, and that these performance deficits are not likely due to any general sensorimotor impairments. Carbamazepine had milder, but detectable negative effects, as carbamazepine-treated animals exhibited initial acquisition deficits, but rapidly achieved escape levels comparable to controls. In marked contrast, valproate and ethosuximide had no detectable effects on learning in the water maze. These results parallel previous findings in rats treated with these compounds and tested in an instrumental learning task, and are in general agreement with the human clinical literature. To the extent that one might wish to minimize learning deficits associated with maintenance on antiepileptic drugs, phenytoin is definitely not the treatment of choice, while valproate or ethosuximide are apparently much less disruptive.     

Moralist,technician, sophist,teacher/learner: Reflections on the ethicist in the clinical setting

The ethicist's role in the clinical context is not presently well defined. Ethicists can be thought of as moralists, technicians, Sophists, or as teachers and learners. Each of these roles is examined in turn. An argument is made for the ethicist as a teacher who must also learn a great deal about the clinical setting in order to encourage an effective critical examination of basic values. Four specific tasks of this teaching role are discussed: describing moral experience, eliciting assumptions, considering multiple alternatives and justifying choices.     

Trust,autonomy, and advance directives

Trust has been largely ignored in contemporary bioethical discussions and also by courts of law. The favored language of autonomy, privacy, and rights is useful but insufficient to speak to moral experience, especially the experience of persons who write advance directives, but also physicians who receive such directives. The Brophy case is analyzed for its salient features, and a more central place for the concept of trust is proposed.This paper was presented at the Lehigh Valley Hospital Center Conference, Making Medical Decisions with and for Patients in Difficult Medical Circumstances, in 1988.The author has profited greatly in writing this paper from reading Nancy King'sMaking Sense of Advance Directives, to be published by D. Reidel, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.     

Visual Information and the Control of Reaching in Children: A Comparison Between Children With and Without Developmental Coordination Disorder

Three experiments were performed on reach and grasp in 9- to 10-year-old children (8 controls and 8 with developmental coordination disorder [DCD]). In normal reaching, children in the DCD group were less responsive to the accuracy demands of the task in controlling the transport component of prehension and spent less time in the deceleration phase of hand transport. When vision was removed as movement began, children in the control group spent more time decelerating and reached peak aperture earlier. Children in the DCD group did not do that, although, like the control group, they did increase grip aperture in the dark. When depth cues were reduced and only the target or only the target and hand were visible, children in the control group used target information to maintain the same grip aperture in all conditions, but DCD children behaved as if the target was not visible. Throughout the studies, the control group of 9- to 10-year-olds did not produce adult-like adaptations to reduced vision, suggesting that they had not yet attained adult-like integration of sensory input. Compared with control children, children with DCD did not exhibit increased dependence on vision but showed less recognition of accuracy demands, less adaptation to the removal of vision, and less use of minimal visual information when it was available.     

Journal review: Methods: A Journal for human science

Abstract

A model of transpersonal human development is described. This model links higher levels of later development back to earlier levels by a spiral movement. By such a developmental shift, a restorative return can lead beyond ego development toward a goal of transpersonal, whole psyche integration.