Harvesting the living?: separating "brain death" and organ transplantation

The chronic shortage of transplantable organs has reached critical proportions. In the wake of this crisis, some bioethicists have argued that there is sufficient public support to expand organ recovery through use of neocortical criteria of death or even pre-mortem organ retrieval. I present a typology of ways in which data gathered from the public can be misread or selectively used by bioethicists in service of an ideological or policy agenda, resulting in bad policy and bad ethics. Such risks should lead us to look at alternatives for increasing organ supplies short of expanding or abandoning the dead donor rule. The chronic problem of organ scarcity should prompt bioethicists to engage in constructive dialogue about the relation of the social sciences and bioethics, to examine the social malleability of the definition of death, and to revisit the question of the priority of organ transplants in the overall package of healthcare benefits provided to most, but not all, citizens.     

A longitudinal study of gender-related cognition and behaviour

Gender schema theory proposes that children's acquisition of gender labels and gender stereotypes informs gender-congruent behaviour. Most previous studies have been cross-sectional and do not address the temporal relationship between knowledge and behaviour. We report the results of a longitudinal study of gender knowledge and sex-typed behaviour across three domains in children tested at 24 and 36 months (N = 56). Although both knowledge and sex-typed behaviour increased significantly between 2 and 3 years, there was no systematic pattern of cross-lagged correlations between the two, although some concurrent relationships were present at 24 months. Future longitudinal work might profitably focus on younger children using reliable preverbal measures of gender knowledge and employing a shorter lag between measurement times.     

A meta-analytic review of gender variations in children's language use: talkativeness, affiliative speech, and assertive speech

Three sets of meta-analyses examined gender effects on children's language use. Each set of analyses considered an aspect of speech that is considered to be gender typed: talkativeness, affiliative speech, and assertive speech. Statistically significant average effect sizes were obtained with all three language constructs. On average, girls were slightly more talkative and used more affiliative speech than did boys, whereas boys used more assertive speech than did girls. However, the average effect sizes were either negligible (talkativeness, d=0.11; assertive speech, d=0.11) or small (affiliative speech, d=0.26). Larger effect sizes were indicated for some language constructs depending on either the operational definition of the language measure, the method of recording, the child's age level, the interaction partner (adult or peer), group size, gender composition, observational setting, or type of activity. The results are interpreted in relation to social-developmental and social-constructionist approaches to gender; these views are presented as complementary--rather than competing--meta-theoretical viewpoints.     

Too proud to let go: narcissistic entitlement as a barrier to forgiveness

Narcissistic entitlement impedes forgiveness in ways not captured by other robust predictors (e.g., offense severity, apology, relationship closeness, religiosity, Big Five personality factors), as demonstrated in 6 studies. Narcissistic entitlement involves expectations of special treatment and preoccupation with defending one's rights. In Study 1, entitlement predicted less forgiveness and greater insistence on repayment for a past offense. Complementary results emerged from Study 2, which used hypothetical transgressions, and Study 3, which assessed broad forgiveness dispositions. Study 4 examined associations with the Big Five, and Study 5 extended the findings to a laboratory context. Study 6 demonstrated that entitlement predicted diminished increases in forgiveness over time. Taken together, these results suggest that narcissistic entitlement is a robust, distinct predictor of unforgiveness.     

Two measures of affect and emotion in Italian children aged 6 to 11 years

The authors investigated the relation between affective and cognitive processes in fantasy play and emotional understanding of 50 Italian children (25 boys and 25 girls) enrolled in regular elementary school in Northern Italy. Children were administered a standardized play task, the Affect in Play Scale, and answered questions about their understanding of emotions. Consistent, yet modest, relationships were found between dimensions of fantasy play and emotional understanding.     

Sensory discrimination and intelligence: testing Spearman's other hypothesis

At the centenary of Spearman's seminal 1904 article, his general intelligence hypothesis remains one of the most influential in psychology. Less well known is the article's other hypothesis that there is "a correspondence between what may provisionally be called 'General Discrimination' and 'General Intelligence' which works out with great approximation to one or absoluteness" (Spearman, 1904, p. 284). Studies that do not find high correlations between psychometric intelligence and single sensory discrimination tests do not falsify this hypothesis. This study is the first directly to address Spearman's general intelligence-general sensory discrimination hypothesis. It attempts to replicate his findings with a similar sample of schoolchildren. In a well-fitting structural equation model of the data, general intelligence and general discrimination correlated .92. In a reanalysis of data published byActon and Schroeder (2001), general intelligence and general sensory ability correlated .68 in men and women. One hundred years after its conception, Spearman's other hypothesis achieves some confirmation. The association between general intelligence and general sensory ability remains to be replicated and explained.     

Disposition to recognize goals in infant chimpanzees

Do nonhuman primates attribute goals to others? Traditional studies with chimpanzees provide equivocal evidence for “mind reading” in nonhuman primates. Here we adopt looking time, a methodology commonly used with human infants to test infant chimpanzees. In this experiment, four infant chimpanzees saw computer-generated stimuli that mimicked a goal-directed behavior. The baby chimps performed as well as human infants, namely, they were sensitive to the trajectories of the objects, thus suggesting that chimpanzees may be endowed with a disposition to understand goal-directed behaviors. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.     

The effects of extinction,noncontingent reinforcement and differential reinforcement of other behavior as control procedures

Several techniques have been used in applied research as controls for the introduction of a reinforcement contingency, including extinction, noncontingent reinforcement (NCR), and differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO). Little research, however, has examined the relative strengths and limitations of these "reversal" controls. We compared the effects of extinction with those of NCR and DRO in both multi-element and reversal designs, with respect to (a) rate and amount of response decrement, (b) rate of response recovery following reintroduction of reinforcement, and (c) any positive or negative side effects associated with transitions. Results indicated that extinction generally produced the most consistent and rapid reversal effects, with few observed negative side effects.     

Confidence judgments in event recall: developmental progression in the impact of question format

Two studies were conducted to examine developmental progression in children's and adults' ability to adequately monitor their own attempts to recall event details as well as the dependence of such metamemorial competencies on question formats. Eight and 10-year-old children as well as adults (Study 1, N=116; Study 2, N=60) rated their confidence when responding to specific questions about an observed event. Confirming most recent results, children and adults gave higher confidence ratings after correct than after incorrect answers. This ability, however, was limited to an unbiased question format. When being asked misleading questions, children's ability to differentiate was undermined, as reflected in equally high confidence judgments after correct and incorrect answers, even when the interview contained a mix of misleading and unbiased questions. When the interviewer "bombarded" the children with an uninterrupted series of misleading questions, children's difficulties appeared to be even more pronounced. These findings highlight the importance of the way in which questions are asked, and point to age-related progression in the relative impact of questioning style.