The morality of harm

In this article, we discuss the range of concerns people weigh when evaluating the acceptability of harmful actions and propose a new perspective on the relationship between harm and morality. With this aim, we examine Kelly, Stich, Haley, Eng and Fessler’s [Kelly, D., Stich, S., Haley, K., Eng, S., & Fessler, D. (2007). Harm, affect, and the moral/conventional distinction. Mind and Language, 22, 117-131] recent claim that, contrary to Turiel and associates, people do not judge harm to be authority independent and general in scope in the context of complex harmful scenarios (e.g., prisoner interrogation, military training). In a modified replication of their study, we examined participants’ judgments of harmful actions in these contexts by taking into account their explanations for their judgments. We claim that both in terms of participants’ judgments and rationales, the results largely confirm our hypothesis that actions involving harm andinjustice or rights violation are judged to be authority independent and general in scope, which is a modification of Turiel’s traditional hypothesis.     

Revolutionary Claims and Visions in Psychotherapy: An Anthropathological Perspective

Consideration of the semantic problem of revolution in psychotherapy is followed by some justifications for a critical and subjective approach to this discussion. Alleged revolutions in the field are critically examined, followed by an envisaged revolution and its possible ingredients. Attention is paid to the concept of a revolutionary new human, with affective-somatic and embodied-mystical examples given. Obstacles to such revolution are briefly examined and the concept of universal human sickness or anthropathology is discussed, along with the notion of an anti-anthropathological revolution.     

Affectionate Writing Reduces Total Cholesterol: Two Randomized,Controlled Trials

In two 5‐week trials, healthy college students were randomly assigned either to experimental or control groups. Participants in the experimental groups wrote about their affection for significant friends, relatives, and/or romantic partners for 20 minutes on three separate occasions; on the same schedule, those in the control groups wrote about innocuous topics. Total cholesterol was assessed via capillary blood at the beginning of the trials and again at the end. Participants in the experimental groups experienced statistically significant reductions in total cholesterol. Control participants in the first study experienced a significant increase during the same period, whereas those in the second study did not. Cholesterol changes were largely unmoderated by linguistic features of the writing produced in the intervention. Potential therapeutic implications are discussed.     

Logic with numbers

Many people regard utility theory as the only rigorous foundation for subjective probability, and even de Finetti thought the betting approach supplemented by Dutch Book arguments only good as an approximation to a utility-theoretic account. I think that there are good reasons to doubt this judgment, and I propose an alternative, in which the probability axioms are consistency constraints on distributions of fair betting quotients. The idea itself is hardly new: it is in de Finetti and also Ramsey. What is new is that it is shown that probabilistic consistency and consequence can be defined in a way formally analogous to the way these notions are defined in deductive (propositional) logic. The result is a free-standing logic which does not pretend to be a theory of rationality and is therefore immune to, among other charges, that of “logical omniscience”.     

Capturing conceptual implicit memory: The time it takes to produce an association

Conceptual implicit memory is demonstrated when, in the absence of explicit retrieval, performance on a task requiring conceptual processing benefits more from prior conceptual encoding than from prior nonconceptual encoding. In the present study, we sought to provide an improved measure of conceptual implicit memory by minimizing contamination from explicit retrieval. On a modified word association test, participants free-associated to the actually studied items, with response time to produce any associate serving as the dependent measure. Experiment 1 varied whether words were read or generated at study and showed that generated words were associated to more quickly than were read words. Experiment 2 varied level of processing at study and showed that words processed semantically were associated to more quickly than were words processed nonsemantically. With modifications to ensure its implicit nature, a conceptual implicit test can be consistently affected by the same encoding manipulations as those that affect conceptual explicit memory tests.     

Factor structure of the Schizophrenia Quality of Life Scale Revision 4 (SQLS-R4)

The Schizophrenia Quality of Life Scale Revision 4 (SQLS-R4) appears to offer excellent potential as an easily administered and patient acceptable assessment and monitoring measure of quality of life (QoL). However, a principle psychometric criterion crucial to the use and validity of the instrument concerns the underlying factor structure. The SQLS-R4 comprises two sub-scales, these being cognition and vitality QoL and psychosocial feelings QoL. However, the factor structure of the SQLS-R4 has yet to be established in a patient group in the UK. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the SQLS-R4 to determine its psychometric properties in 100 patients with a primary ICD-10 diagnosis of schizophrenia. Internal reliability of the SQLS-R4 cognition and vitality QoL and psychosocial feelings QoL sub-scales was found to be excellent. Consistent with the original validation of the SQLS-R4, two correlated factors comprising cognition and vitality QoL and psychosocial feelings QoL were observed to offer the best fit to the data. In conclusion, the SQLS-R4 would appear to be suitable for use in patients with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia in the UK. Potential clinical uses and the direction of future research with the SQLS-R4 are indicated.     

Animal Minds,Cognitive Ethology,and Ethics

Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretations are a matter of scientific consensus. It is especially important to understand why loose references to “cognitive ethology” by philosophers can signal ignorance of the field to scientists who are more deeply immersed in the relevant literature. Understanding the variety of approaches to cognitive phenomena in animals is essential if such capacities are to form the foundation of scientifically-informed ethical reasoning about animals.     

Internet-delivered assessment and manipulation of anxiety-linked attentional bias: Validation of a free-access attentional probe software package

It recently has been established within the laboratory that the attentional probe methodology not only can sensitively assess the threat attentional bias associated with anxiety vulnerability, but also can be configured to yield training tasks capable of modifying emotional vulnerability by manipulating such attentional selectivity. In order to appraise and exploit the potential practical applications of such procedures, it is desirable that clinical investigators without specialist equipment should become able to deliver such tasks within field settings. The present research program involved development of a fully customizable attentional probe software package, that delivers assessment and training versions of the probe task across the Internet. Two experimental studies served to validate the assessment and training efficacy of resulting probe task variants, completed remotely by GAD sufferers and nonclinical populations using their own computers. We advise fellow researchers how to freely download this software package for use within their own investigations.