A Study of Health Perception,Disability Acceptance,and Life Satisfaction Based on Types of Leisure Activity Among Koreans with a Physical Disability

Leisure studies provide evidence that leisure engagement serves as a vehicle for improving life satisfaction among individuals with a physical disability. However, a dearth of research addresses which types of leisure activities are associated with specific psychological benefits. This study sought to capture three aspects of psychological benefits: acceptance of disability, life satisfaction, and health perception, and to explore how leisure activities are related to these psychological benefits. Using data released from the 2011 Panel Survey of Employment for the Disabled in Korea, this study found that individuals with a physical disability who participate in social activity, religious activity, and Internet use reported high health perception, life satisfaction, and disability acceptance. In particular, findings of this study provide evidence that social activity participation plays an important role in increasing health benefits among individuals with a physical disability.     

That’s the man who did it,or was it a woman? Actor similarity and binding errors in event memory

Mistakes in eyewitness identification frequently occur when incorrect associations are made between a familiar person and the actions of another person. The present research demonstrates that actors do not need to be similar in appearance for such conjunction errors to occur. The actors can, in fact, be very different in appearance, even of different sexes. Participants attempted to remember a series of brief everyday events, each involving an actor performing an action. Increases in actor similarity led to increases in conjunction errors in which participants incorrectly associated a familiar actor with a familiar action that was actually performed by someone else, but conjunction errors frequently occurred even when the familiar actor was of a different sex than the original actor, arguing against the hypothesis that these conjunction errors are due solely to mistaken identity.     

Accidental germ-line modifications through somatic cell gene therapies: some ethical considerations

Proposed somatic cell gene-therapies (especially those involving in utero therapies) may involve a small risk of germ-line modifications; this risk has engendered serious concern, and arguments have been made that such therapies ought not be pursued if such risks exists. We argue here that while pursuing deliberate germ-line modifications in humans would be inappropriate given the current state of the art, the risk of accidental germ-line modifications from most currently proposed in utero gene therapy is no different in kind or degree from other risks regularly taken in medical procedures. Given the possible benefits of such therapies, we argue that the risk of accidental germ-line modifications is well worth taking in these cases.     

Assessing the Experience of Autonomy in New Cultures and Contexts

This research demonstrates the usefulness of the technique of Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) in the construction of indices of the experience of autonomy, a central construct in Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory of motivation and personality (SDT, 2000) and a construct central to recent controversies on socialization in different cultures. We propose that SSA has two advantages in comparison to correlation tables in the assessment of the experience of autonomy. First, it allows easy identification of items that best capture the various motivations along the relative autonomy continuum postulated by SDT. Second, and more important, it can reveal data patterns that might contribute to theoretical refinement that otherwise might remain unnoticed. These advantages were demonstrated in three Israeli samples: two samples of elementary school children (n = 697 and n = 417), and one sample of high school students (n = 317). Discussion considers ways in which SSA can contribute to the development and refinement of measures and theory pertaining to the experience of autonomy in cultures and contexts not examined so far.

Benacerraf,Field, and the agreement of mathematicians

Synthese - Hartry Field’s epistemological challenge to the mathematical platonist is often cast as an improvement on Paul Benacerraf’s original epistemological challenge. I disagree....     

Psychopathology in mothers of children with failure to thrive

An association between maternal psychopathology and failure to thrive (FTT) has been reported previously, but no prior investigators have used both operationalized diagnostic criteria for psychopathology and a control group in their studies. Twenty-eight mothers of children with FTT and 22 mothers of normally developing control children were assessed for psychopathology by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R–Nonpatient Version (SCID-NP) and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R–Personality Disorders (SCID-II). Affective disorders, personality disorders, and the COoccurrence in an indvidual of these two types of disorders were found at higher rates in mothers of children with FTT compared to controls. These results clarify prior reports of an association between failure to thrive and maternal psychopathology and may have implications for treatment approaches to FTT.