Deliberating About the Public Interest

Although the idea of the public interest features prominently in many accounts of deliberative democracy, the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest is rarely spelt out with any degree of precision. In this article, I identify and defend one particular way of framing this relationship. I begin by arguing that people can deliberate about the public interest only if the public interest is, in principle, identifiable independently of their deliberations. Of course, some pluralists claim that the public interest is an implausible idea, which casts doubt on the idea that there might be something for people to deliberate about. Yet while, following Brian Barry, we can get around this problem by defining the public interest as an interest in which everyone shares qua member of the public, what still needs to be explained is why people should be prepared to privilege this particular capacity. I argue that the account of political equality with which deliberative democracy is bound up offers a compelling explanation of this sort, even if it also gives rise to some difficult questions of feasibility. I conclude by considering the charge that any political scheme that framed the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest in this way would be undesirable.     

Introduction

Spiritual and religious beliefs and practices are commonplace in the general population of North America today. In recognition of this fact, research on the interplay of spirituality, religion, and psychological variables increased substantially over the past 3 decades; a recent PsycInfo search identified over 28,000 scientific contributions to this area. However, the relevance of spirituality and religion to clinical practice remains poorly understood. As a result, many practitioners of empirically supported treatments may be reticent to address spirituality and religion in the course of their work. The intent of this special series is to help demystify this topic with the hope of increasing dissemination of spiritually sensitive, empirically supported treatments. The authors in this series cast some light on this understudied topic by highlighting several salient spiritual and religious issues in behavior change. Moreover, based on case material, the authors illustrate how to assess for and address both adaptive and maladaptive utilizations of spirituality and religion in the practice of cognitive behavior therapy. This introductory paper presents a rationale for why it is important to address this topic, and provides an overview of recent research developments in the creation of spiritually integrated psychosocial treatments.     

The development of joint visual attention: a longitudinal study of gaze following during interactions with mothers and strangers

Two- to 8-month-old infants interacted with their mother or a stranger in a prospective longitudinal gaze following study. Gaze following, as assessed by eye tracking, emerged between 2 and 4 months and stabilized between 6 and 8 months of age. Overall, infants followed the gaze of a stranger more than they followed the gaze of their mothers, demonstrating a stranger preference that emerged between 4 and 6 months of age. These findings do not support the notion that infants acquire gaze following through reinforcement learning. Instead, the findings are discussed with respect to the social cognitive framework, suggesting that young infants are driven by social cognitive motives in their interactions with others.     

Pharmakotherapie der Begleitdepression

Depressive St?rungen geh?ren bei Allgemeinkrankenhauspatienten zu den h?ufigsten psychischen St?rungen. Sie haben oft negative Auswirkungen auf die Prognose und die Behandlung k?rperlicher Erkrankungen. Selbst für den routinierten und erfahrenen Arzt stellt die antidepressive Pharmakotherapie depressiver Patienten mit somatischen Krankheiten oftmals eine besondere Herausforderung dar. In diesem Kontext gilt es in der Regel, unerwünschte Arzneimittelwirkungen bei Komedikation mit anderen Pharmaka – wie zum Beispiel den Wirkverlust eines zuvor in stabilen Erhaltungsdosen verabreichten Medikaments oder ein erh?htes Risiko für die Entwicklung von Arzneimittelnebenwirkungen – zu vermeiden.     

Vegetative state: efforts to curb misdiagnosis

Media reports on the case of Rom Houben have constituted a new reminder of the risks of misdiagnosis with cases with apparent vegetative state, particularly when following the clinical consensus of the care team as diagnostic criterion. Systematic use of behavioral and non-behavioral assessment strategies (e.g., behavioral scales, event-related potentials, and neuro-imaging) may help reduce the aforementioned risks. A new learning assessment strategy could also be considered part of the assessment to extend the evaluation process. Signs of learning might be viewed as forms of concrete knowledge representing a basic level of non-reflective consciousness.     

Unexpected changes in direction of motion attract attention

Under some circumstances, moving objects capture attention. Whether a change in the direction of a moving object attracts attention is still unexplored. We investigated this using a continuous tracking task. In Experiment 1, four grating patches changed smoothly and semirandomly in their positions and orientations, and observers attempted to track the orientations of two of them. After the stimuli disappeared, one of the two target gratings was queried and observers reported its orientation; hence direction of the gratings' motion across the screen was an irrelevant feature. Despite the irrelevance of its motion, when the nonqueried grating had collided with an invisible boundary within the last 200 msec of the trial, accuracy reporting the queried grating was worse than when it had not. Attention was likely drawn by the unexpected nature of these changes in direction of motion, since the effect was eliminated when the boundaries were visible (Experiment 2). This tendency for unexpected motion changes to attract attention has important consequences for the monitoring of objects in everyday environments.     

Response priming driven by local contrast, not subjective brightness

We demonstrate qualitative dissociations of brightness processing in visuomotor priming and conscious vision. Speeded keypress responses to the brighter of two luminance targets were performed in the presence of preceding dark and bright primes (clearly visible and flanking the targets) whose apparent brightness values were enhanced or attenuated by a visual illusion. Response times to the targets were greatly affected by consistent versus inconsistent arrangements of the primes, relative to the targets (response priming). Priming effects could systematically contradict subjective brightness matches, such that one prime could appear brighter than the other but could prime as if it were darker. Systematic variation of the illusion showed that response-priming effects depended only on local flanker-background contrast, not on the subjective appearance of the flankers. Our findings suggest that speeded motor responses, as opposed to conscious perceptual judgments, access an early phase of lightness and brightness processing prior to full lightness constancy.