Liberty to Decide on Dual Use Biomedical Research: An Acknowledged Necessity

Humanity entered the twenty-first century with revolutionary achievements in biomedical research. At the same time multiple “dual-use” results have been published. The battle against infectious diseases is meeting new challenges, with newly emerging and re-emerging infections. Both natural disaster epidemics, such as SARS, avian influenza, haemorrhagic fevers, XDR and MDR tuberculosis and many others, and the possibility of intentional mis-use, such as letters containing anthrax spores in USA, 2001, have raised awareness of the real threats. Many great men, including Goethe, Spinoza, J.B. Shaw, Fr. Engels, J.F. Kennedy and others, have recognized that liberty is also a responsibility. That is why the liberty to decide now represents an acknowledged necessity: biomedical research should be supported, conducted and published with appropriate measures to prevent potential “dual use”. Biomedical scientists should work according to the ethical principles of their Code of Conduct, an analogue of Hippocrates Oath of doctors; and they should inform government, society and their juniors about the problem. National science consulting boards of experts should be created to prepare guidelines and control the problem at state level. An international board should develop minimum standards to be applicable by each country. Bio-preparedness is considered another key-measure.     

Sampling in research on interpersonal aggression

The aim of this study was to investigate the usefulness of convenience samples in research on interpersonal aggression among adults. It was hypothesised that convenience sampled targets of aggression differs from targets in general with regards to both demographic characteristics and degree of aggression exposed to. A convenience sample comprising support-seeking targets of workplace bullying was compared with a representative sample of Norwegian targets of bullying. The results showed that the two samples differed significantly on all demographic variables investigated, except gender. A far higher percentage of the convenience sample had blown the whistle on illegal, immoral or illegitimate practice at their workplace, whereas they also reported significantly more frequent and more intense exposure to aggression. The findings confirm that convenience samples have low external validity when generalising to the general population. Such samples should therefore mainly be used to investigate tendencies in, and the phenomenology of, interpersonal aggression, in studies where generalisability is not the principal objective.     

The effects of social influence on children's memory reports: the omission and commission error asymmetry

Children in two age groups (7 vs. 12 yrs, N= 174) individually interacted with a stranger and were later interviewed about this event. Right before the interview, each child encountered the stranger once again and he engaged in a conversation where he either suggested that a (central or peripheral) detail originally present in the event had actually not been there or that an originally non-present (central or peripheral) detail had in fact been there. It was hypothesized that the two types of misinformation would result in omission and commission errors respectively. The results showed that the social influence resulted in an asymmetric effect (i.e., more commission than omission errors). Importantly, we also found that the children made more errors with respect to the peripheral detail (a suitcase), compared to the central detail (a passenger). Younger children did not make more errors (neither omission nor commission errors) than older children.     

Hebb learning, verbal short-term memory, and the acquisition of phonological forms in children

Recent work using the Hebb effect as a marker for implicit long-term acquisition of serial order has demonstrated a functional equivalence across verbal and visuospatial short-term memory. The current study extends this observation to a sample of five- to six-year-olds using verbal and spatial immediate serial recall and also correlates the magnitude of Hebb learning with explicit measures of word and nonword paired-associate learning. Comparable Hebb effects were observed in both domains, but only nonword learning was significantly related to the magnitude of Hebb learning. Nonword learning was also independently related to individuals' general level of verbal serial recall. This suggests that vocabulary acquisition depends on both a domain-specific short-term memory system and a domain-general process of learning through repetition.     

Familiarity breeds distortion: the effects of media exposure on false reports concerning media coverage of the terrorist attacks in london on 7 July 2005

The present experiment investigated whether increased media exposure could lead to an increase in memory distortions regarding a traumatic public event: the explosion of the No. 30 bus in Tavistock Square, London on 7 July 2005. A total of 150 Swedish and 150 UK participants completed a series of questionnaires about their memory of either (i) the aftermath of the explosion, (ii) a non-existent computerised reconstruction of the moment of the explosion, or (iii) non-existent closed circuit television footage of the moment of the explosion. In line with the availability heuristic, U.K. participants were more likely than Swedish participants to claim to have seen all three types of footage. Furthermore, a subsample of U.K. participants who appeared to have developed false "memories" of seeing the No. 30 bus explode scored significantly higher on measures of dissociation and fantasy proneness than participants who did not develop false "memories". This experiment provides further support for the role of imaginative processes in the development of false memories.     

Methylphenidate amplifies long-term plasticity in the hippocampus via noradrenergic mechanisms

Methylphenidate treatment is used for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and can improve learning and memory. Previously, improvements were considered a by-product of increased attention; however, we hypothesize that methylphenidate directly alters mechanisms underlying learning and memory, and therefore examined its effects on hippocampal long-term potentiation and long-term depression. Methylphenidate enhanced both mechanisms in the absence of presynaptic changes and in a noradrenalin beta-receptor-dependent manner. These findings can explain both the improved learning and memory and decreased learning selectivity found with methylphenidate treatment and constitute the first demonstration of direct actions of methylphenidate on mechanisms implicated in cognition.     

Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness

The need for social connection is a fundamental human motive, and it is increasingly clear that feeling socially connected confers mental and physical health benefits. However, in many cultures, societal changes are leading to growing social distrust and alienation. Can feelings of social connection and positivity toward others be increased? Is it possible to self-generate these feelings? In this study, the authors used a brief loving-kindness meditation exercise to examine whether social connection could be created toward strangers in a controlled laboratory context. Compared with a closely matched control task, even just a few minutes of loving-kindness meditation increased feelings of social connection and positivity toward novel individuals on both explicit and implicit levels. These results suggest that this easily implemented technique may help to increase positive social emotions and decrease social isolation.     

Description and First Steps Toward the Empirical Validation of the Plan Formulation Method for Couples

The aim of this paper is to empirically assess the reliability of the plan formulation method for couples, a procedure for formulating the case, planning, and monitoring the couple therapies according to control-mastery theory. We hypothesized that when couples are looking for couple therapy, they have an unconscious couple’s plan for the therapy, which includes the couple’s goals; the pathogenic beliefs that the partners want to disprove; the traumas from which these beliefs originated and that the partners want to master; the vicious relational circles that make the couple suffer and that the couple wants to break; the virtuous relational circles that are expressions of the couple’s resources and that the couple wants to fuel; and the relational insights that may help the couple get better. Our study involved 15 couples treated by four experienced therapists. Four raters independently formulated each couple’s plan based on the first three sessions following a standard procedure, and we calculated the intraclass correlation for pooled judges’ ratings. For a subsample of three couples—who before and after treatment had completed the dyadic adjustment scale (DAS) and the outcome questionnaire-45.2 (OQ-45.2)—the compatibility of the therapists’ interventions with the couples’ and partners’ plans was assessed. The relationship between the ratings of compatibility, DAS and OQ-45.2, was assessed. The results showed excellent interjudge reliability for each couple’s plan formulation (average ICC?=?0.82), attesting to the validity of the procedure; and preliminary data on the therapeutic process suggested that therapists’ interventions compatible with couple’s plans could help partners achieve good outcomes.

     

Assessing Violence Risk: A Review and Clinical Recommendations

Guidance to identify and manage clients with a perceived high risk for future violence is of great importance for mental health professionals. In the past decade, several structured instruments have been developed to assess risk of future violence. Awareness of the limits and abilities of such instruments is required. This article reviews the most well‐known risk assessment tools and provides recommendations for how to approach the area of violence risk assessment.     

Infants perceive human point-light displays as solid forms

While five-month-old infants show orientation-specific sensitivity to changes in the motion and occlusion patterns of human point-light displays, it is not known whether infants are capable of binding a human representation to these displays. Furthermore, it has been suggested that infants do not encode the same physical properties for humans and material objects. To explore these issues we tested whether infants would selectively apply the principle of solidity to upright human displays. In the first experiment infants aged six and nine months were repeatedly shown a human point-light display walking across a computer screen up to 10 times or until habituated. Next, they were repeatedly shown the walking display passing behind an in-depth representation of a table, and finally they were shown the human display appearing to pass through the table top in violation of the solidity of the hidden human form. Both six- and nine-month-old infants showed significantly greater recovery of attention to this final phase. This suggests that infants are able to bind a solid vertical form to human motion. In two further control experiments we presented displays that contained similar patterns of motion but were not perceived by adults as human. Six- and nine-month-old infants did not show recovery of attention when a scrambled display or an inverted human display passed through the table. Thus, the binding of a solid human form to a display in only seems to occur for upright human motion. The paper considers the implications of these findings in relation to theories of infants' developing conceptions of objects, humans and animals.