The Ecological Validity of Delay Aversion and Response Inhibition as Measures of Impulsivity in AD/HD: A Supplement to the NIMH Multimodal Treatment Study of AD/HD

Impulsivity is a primary symptom of the combined type of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD). The Stop Signal Paradigm is premised upon a primary deficit in inhibitory control in AD/HD, whereas the Delay Aversion Hypothesis, by contrast, conceptualizes impulsivity in AD/HD, not as an inability to inhibit a response, but rather as a choice to avoid delay. This study compared the ecological validity of the Stop Signal Task (SST) and Choice-Delay Task (C-DT) measure of delay aversion, with respect to their relative utility in discriminating AD/HD children from normal control participants, and their correlations with classroom observations and with ratings of impulsivity and other core AD/HD symptoms on the Conners and SNAP-IV checklists. The tasks exhibited modest discriminant validity when used individually and excellent discriminant validity when used in combination. The C-DT correlated with teacher ratings of impulsivity, hyperactivity, and conduct problems, and with observations of gross motor activity, physical aggression, and an AD/HD composite score. The SST correlated with the observations only. These results suggest that delay aversion is associated with a broad range of AD/HD characteristics whereas inhibitory failure seems to tap a more discrete dimension of executive control     

The Ethnic Mentor Undergraduate Program: A Brief Description and Preliminary Findings

The Ethnic Mentor Undergraduate (EMU) Program targets students from traditionally underrepresented ethnic backgrounds and aims at fostering skills and attitudes necessary to persist to graduation. Findings indicate that EMU protégés perform better than the university-wide average and that drop-out rates are reduced. Implications for mentoring programs are discussed.     

Integration of Intention and Outcome Information by Students and Circuit Court Judges: Design Economy and Individual Differences1

In two experiments the subjects, who included State Circuit Court Judges, assigned a quantitative judgment of blame to hypothetical offenders as a function of level of intention and seriousness of outcome. In accordance with the findings of numerous other investigators using the Intent x Damage paradigm, averaged subjects appeared to follow an adding rule for the integration of intention and outcome damage information. Furthermore, and in keeping with a key methodological purpose of the research, equivalent averaged results were observed whether student subjects made just one judgment of a single Level of Intention x Level of Outcome Damage treatment combination (independent groups design) or multiple judgments of all possible such factorial treatment combinations (repeated measures design). However, statistical analysis of individual students' and individual judges' repeated measures showed that about half of them adopted an adding rule whereas the judgments of others conformed to an intention-only rule. Some implications of the findings are: (a) in critical respects students' results are quite generalizable since there were no striking student versus judge differences; (b) averaged outcomes conceal important interpretable individual differences in information processing that are highly commensurate for students and judges; and (c) there is thus a defensible and pragmatically desirable economy in the adoption of repeated measures designs for the study of individual persons in such less accessible categories as the Judiciary.     

Paradigms and Personhood: A Deepening of the Dilemmas in Ethics and Medical Ethics

There are many calls for a definitions personhood, but also many logical and Wittgensteinian reasons to think fulfilling this is unimportant or impossible. I argue that we can consider many contexts as language-games and consider the person as the key player in each. We can then examine the attributes, presuppositions and implications of personhood in those contexts. I use law and therapeutic psychology as two examples of such contexts or language-games. Each correlates with one of the classic “theories” of ethics-deontology and consequentialism. But each is a large enough cluster to consider them as paradigms in a sense related to Thomas Kuhn's notion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Showing the presuppositions about and “takes” on personhood together with the connections involved in the paradigms deepens the dilemmas we already know to be present. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Timmermann,Forschler, and The Attempt to Bridge the Kantian‐Consequentialist Gap

Scott Forschler defends R. M. Hare's rationalist‐universalizing‐utilitarian moral approach against Jens Timmermann's critique of it. He argues that Timmermann fails to see that Kant's ethical rationalism might be consistent with utilitarianism, and argues that Timmermann merely assumes that Kant's deontology follows logically from his ethical rationalism. In Forschler's estimation, it has not been established that either Kant's or Hare's ethical rationalism is inconsistent with utilitarianism. This article, however, argues that, in his response to Timmermann on behalf of Hare's rationalist‐universalizing‐utilitarian approach, Forschler has overlooked something very significant at the foundational level of Hare's moral approach, and that this oversight undercuts his response to Timmermann. The analysis also invites a metaethical investigation of preference satisfaction as it is found in Hare's moral approach. The article uncovers some fundamental metaethical presuppositions in Hare's normative approach, presuppositions overlooked by Forschler.