Respect and Types of Injustice

Jonathan Wolff and Timothy Hinton have criticized a version of liberal egalitarianism, often associated with Ronald Dworkin, for promoting an account of social justice that fails to treat everyone with respect. This paper analyses Wolff’s and Hinton’s critiques, particularly with regard to how notions of self-respect and respect-standing are deployed. The paper argues that the analyses of both Wolff and Hinton display affinities with a dualist approach to social justice. A dualist approach theorizes respect as an aspect of both distributive, socioeconomic injustice and cultural injustice, rather than of the former only, which is typical of liberal egalitarianism. Nancy Fraser is widely associated with such a dualist framework, so her version is used to assess Wolff’s and Hinton’s work. The paper argues that both make use of ideals and commitments from the dualist approach to justice in their respect objection. However, despite their evident sympathy for the notion of cultural injustice, both continue to theorize respect primarily as an aspect of distributive justice. Thus, for cultural justice theorists, Wolff’s and Hinton’s critiques of Dworkinian justice may leave something to be desired. Thanks to Anne Phillips, Kathy King, Tamara Jugov, Neal Razzell and reviewers for Res Publica for comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Thanks to Itai Rabinowitz for insightful conversations about the issues touched on here. Thanks to the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for making this research possible.     

Sex-role stereotypes and clinical judgments of mental health: The Brovermans' findings reexamined

This study attempted to evaluate the progress of mental health professionals regarding sex-role stereotyping in clinical functioning, identified as a problem over 10 years ago by Broverman et al. (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1970, 34, 1–7). A comparable format and questionnaire were used in order to replicate faithfully the earlier study and facilitate past-present comparisons. One hundred four psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers were randomly assigned to three instruction-set conditions in completing the Stereotype Questionnaire: sexunspecified adult instruction set, female instruction set, and male instruction set. No significant differences were found related to sex of clinician. A significant effect (p<.001) was found for social desirability and what was judged as healthy for sex-unspecified adults. No significant relationship was found, however, for social desirability of traits and conventional sex-role stereotypes. Based on the results of this study it is possible to speculate either that the Boverman results were primarily an artifact of their forced-choice methodology or that progress has been made in a more nonsexist direction among mental health professionals. Limitations of this research are presented and considered relative to the Brovermans' study. The basically attitudinal nature of this work is noted and the question is raised as to whether nonsexist attitudes are translated into nonsexist clinical functioning.     

Effect of depression on quantity and quality of social inferences

Two studies explored depressives' sensitivity to social information as an impediment to their gaining a sense of confidence and control. In Study 1, Ss viewed a videotape of an actor performing an achievement task and were asked to list their impressions of the actor. As compared with nondepressed Ss, depressed Ss generated more inferences overall, generated more abstract inferences, and exhibited less overall confidence in their impression of the actor. In Study 2, Ss reported their beliefs of the utility of information about a person's past behaviors and personality for understanding, predicting future behavior, and describing that person. Depressed Ss expressed more interest than did nondepressed Ss in both types of information but were less confident of the utility of the information for prediction.     

Biases in interpretation and memory in generalized social phobia

Two experiments examined the link between interpretation and memory in individuals diagnosed with Generalized Social Phobia (GSP). In Experiment 1, GSP and control participants generated continuations for nonsocial and ambiguous social scenarios. GSP participants produced more socially anxious and negative continuations for the social scenarios than did the controls. On the subsequent test of recalling the social scenarios, intrusion errors that shared meaning with the original continuations were made more frequently by the GSP group, producing false recall with emotionally negative features. To examine whether nonanxious individuals would also produce such errors if given emotional interpretations, in Experiment 2 the authors asked university students to read the scenarios plus endings produced by GSP participants in Experiment 1. The students either constructed vivid mental images of themselves as the main characters or thought about whether the endings provided closure. Low-anxious students in the closure condition produced fewer ending-based intrusions in recalling the social scenarios than did students in the other 3 conditions. Results illustrate the importance of examining the nature of source-monitoring errors in investigations of memory biases in social anxiety.     

Infant feeding and HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa: what lies beneath the dilemma?

The debate over how to best guide HIV-infected mothers in resource-poor settings on infant feeding is more than two decades old. Globally, breastfeeding is responsible for approximately 300,000 HIV infections per year, while at the same time, UNICEF estimates that not breastfeeding (formula feeding with contaminated water) is responsible for 1.5 million child deaths per year. The largest burden of these infections and deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using this region as an example of the burden faced more generally in other resource-poor settings, we contrast the evolution of the clinical standard of care for infant feeding with HIV-infected mothers in high-income countries to the current international clinical guidelines for HIV-infected mothers and infant feeding in resource-poor settings. While the international guidelines of exclusive breastfeeding for a 6-month period seem to offer the least-worst strategy for reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV during infancy while conferring some immunity through breastfeeding post-6 months, we argue that the impact of the policy on mothers and healthcare workers on the ground is not well understood. The harm reduction approach on the level of health policy translates into a complicated, painful moral dilemma for HIV-positive mothers and those offering them guidance on infant feeding. We argue that the underlying socio-economic disparities that continue to fuel the need for a harm reduction policy on infant feeding and the harm to women and children justify: (1) that higher priority be given to solving the infant feeding dilemma with improved data on safe feeding alternatives, and (2) support of innovative, community-driven solutions that address the particular economic and cultural challenges that continue to result in HIV-transmission to children within these communities.

Flashbulb memories of personal events of 9/11 and the day after for a sample of New York City residents

The present study assessed consistency of recollections of personal circumstances of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and events of the day before (9/10), and the day after (9/12), in a sample of 100 New York City college students. The day before 9/11 represented an ordinary event. A questionnaire was administered twice, 1 wk. and 1 yr. after the 9/11 attack. Students were asked to describe their personal circumstances when hearing about the news of the World Trade Center attack and for the same time of day for 9/10 and 9/12. 18 students returned the follow-up questionnaire. Consistency of initial and follow-up responses for the central categories for both 9/11 and 9/12 of where, who, and activity was very high (9/11: "Where"--100%, "Who"--100%, "What"--94%; 9/12: "Where"--100%, "Who"--100%, "What"--80%). Recollections of 9/10 were significantly less consistent ("Where"--79%, "Who"--71%, "What"--71%). Analysis indicated that students formed vivid, consistent recollections during the events of both 9/11 and 9/12. It is likely that the events of 9/12 also became flashbulb memories, vivid recollections of traumatic events, because the emotional impact of the stressful events, i.e., police and military presence, disrupted schedules, relating to the 9/11 attack endured beyond the day of the attack.     

Perinatal substance abuse and human subjects research: are privacy protections adequate?

Privacy incursions in the clinical care of substance abusing pregnant women have gained lay and professional attention recently as the result of a high-profile Supreme Court finding in Ferguson vs City of Charleston et al. In March, 2001 the Supreme Court determined that nonconsensual drug screening of pregnant women by clinicians in a public hospital violated the women's Fourth Amendment rights to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. Coercive or punitive policy approaches to perinatal substance abuse are often based on mistaken assumptions about the nature of addiction and the outcomes of punitive interventions. Much attention has been given to efforts to criminalize pregnancy for drug using women, and civil laws are also coming under increasing scrutiny. Although no state has passed a law criminalizing pregnancy and drug use, an estimated 250 women in more than 30 states have been prosecuted around the country on theories of "fetal abuse." A growing number of states (eighteen to date) have amended their civil child welfare laws to address specifically the subject of a woman's drug use during pregnancy. No one has examined how these laws and social policies could affect research that includes pregnant and parenting women; women (and their families) who stand to lose a great deal should their drug use be brought to the attention of child welfare or criminal justice authorities. We examine the adequacy of current protective mechanisms, such as federal certificates of confidentiality, in protecting research subjects (and investigators) who may be subject to punitive civil or criminal sanctions. We determine that current protective mechanisms may be insufficient to protect research subjects and that investigators and IRB members are often ignorant of the risks imposed by punitive policy approaches to perinatal substance abuse or fall prey to the same mistaken assumptions that inform punitive policies. We conclude that investigators and IRB members have a moral responsibility to understand local, state and national policies and laws governing perinatal substance abuse. Investigators and IRB members should balance the harms of punitive interventions against the protections that may, or may not be afforded to prospective research subjects as well as the prospective benefits, individual and social, of the research. In situations where criminal or punitive policies are in effect, investigators and IRB members should consider whether adequate protections can be achieved. In the context of inadequate protections, potential risks to prospective research subjects and their families may outweigh the individual or social benefits that accrue from the research. Clinical researchers are professionally obligated to work toward amending laws and policies that are not in the best interests of prospective research subjects.     

A dynamical systems interpretation of a dimensional model of emotion

The dimensional structure of emotion was investigated using self reports of induced mood and idiographic and nomothetic analyses. Subjects attended four experimental sessions during which an array of affective states was induced via auditory, visual, and imaginal channels. For each of 118 stimulus events, subjects self-rated their response. Factor analysis yielded the predicted bipolar factors of valence and arousal: these were obtained in group-aggregated analysis and subsequently confirmed as change dimensions at the intraindividual level. Controversy over the fundamental dimensions of affective space was considered with respect to methodological issues such as factor rotation and sampling of data space. Valence and arousal are discussed as motivational, driving parameters of affective experience and a dynamical systems conceptualization of emotion is proposed.