The Law Says Corporations are Persons,but Psychology Knows Better

Psychologists interested in law and public policy have begun to examine the nature of corporations in American society and the serious consequences of corporate irresponsibility. The dominant trend identifies areas where corporate behavior falls short of ethical standards or leads to unacceptably risky decisions and suggests ways to reform corporations or the laws that regulate them. This well-intentioned approach is consistent with psychology's liberal reformist tendency. Unfortunately, it neither challenges the flawed psychological underpinnings of the legal fiction that corporations are legal persons nor compensates sufficiently for the dynamics of individual behavior in corporate settings. Instead, psychologists should advocate fundamental restructuring of our corporate society.     

Remembering Early Childhood: How Much, How, and Why (or Why Not)

In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.     

Interpretation And Understanding

To understand a term or other symbol, I argue that it is generally neither necessary nor sufficient to assign it a unique determinate reference. Independent of and prior to investigation, it is frequently indeterminate not only whether a sentence is true, but also what its truth conditions are. Nelson Goodman's discussions of likeness of meaning are deployed to explain how this can be so.     

Revisiting Sartre on the question of religion

Jean-Paul Sartre's position on religion has traditionally been reduced to variations of his well-known atheism. This is a result of collapsing the distinction between religion and theism, as both critics and supporters of Sartre have commonly done. Consequently, attention to Sartre's persistent and pervasive concern with religious ideas, symbols, and experiences has been neglected. While the religious implications of Sartre's thought have mostly been considered in relation to Christian theology, other newer areas of religious studies suggest additional avenues for considering Sartre. Sartre's possible connections to four such areas are discussed: 1) Eastern religions; 2) Jewish studies; 3) feminist theology, and 4) the psychoanalysis of religion.     

Enrichment versus exercise effects on motor impairments following cortical removals in rats

Groups of rats were exposed to an enriched environment, given access to an activity wheel, or individually housed in wire mesh cages, impoverished. Rats were exposed in groups of four to the enriched environment or placed individually in the activity wheel for 2 h per day for 25 days preoperatively. Within each exposure group, rats sustained bilateral removals of sensorimotor cortex, or were sham-operated controls. Animals were trained preoperatively to locomote across a narrow elevated runway. Postoperatively, locomotor testing was initiated 17 days after surgery throughout which time all animals were maintained under impoverished conditions. Locomotor deficits following cortical damage were a function of preoperative exposure: enriched rats were least impaired; impoverished rats were most impaired. Rats allowed running wheel activity initially showed the same marked deficits as impoverished animals but recovered more rapidly. The opportunity for physical exercise afforded wheel animals preoperatively may have enhanced motor capabilities that aided recovery. However, physical activity alone did not yield the same protective effects from initial impairment as enrichment. Greater elaboration of neural structures associated with perceptual-motor enrichment probably accounted for the initial sparing of the enriched group.