Personality and Spirituality: Christian Prayer and Eastern Meditation Are Not the Same

A random sample of 1,033 adults in an Australian community survey completed a form containing the abbreviated Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire together with questions about the practice of prayer and Eastern meditation. While prayer was associated with low psychoticism scores, Eastern meditation was associated with high psychoticism scores.     

A Comparison of the Psychometric Properties of the 16PF4 and 16PF5 Among Male Anglican Clergy

Cattell's latest version of the 16PF (16PF5) was completed by a random sample of 580 male Anglican clergy whose names and addresses were provided by the Church Commissioners' payroll. These data demonstrated the robustness and reliability of the new instrument for this specialist population compared to the poor psychometric qualities of the 16PF4 as judged by the same criteria.     

Terrorists and Democrats: Individual Reactions to International Attacks

Three experiments conducted in 1997 and 1998 explored individual responses to reported fictitious international conflict involving the United States and other nations. Participants escalated the conflictual level of their responses to repeated attacks. In Experiment 1, escalation of conflict was greater in response to terrorist attacks than to military ones. In Experiment 2, after the initial attacks, men were more conflictual in responding to terrorist attacks by a democratic nation than by a nondemocratic nation, whereas the opposite pattern was found for women. In Experiment 3, participants responded with a higher level of conflict to terrorist attacks on military targets than to attacks on cultural/educational targets. Participants with greater personality dominance showed steeper escalation of conflict in their responses across successive attacks. These results are interpreted within the framework of an image theory of international relations and an expansion of the democratic peace hypothesis.     

The Case for Psychologism in Default and Inheritance Reasoning

Default reasoning occurs whenever the truth of the evidence available to the reasoner does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion being drawn. Despite this, one is entitled to draw the conclusion “by default” on the grounds that we have no information which would make us doubt that the inference should be drawn. It is the type of conclusion we draw in the ordinary world and ordinary situations in which we find ourselves. Formally speaking, ‘nonmonotonic reasoning’ refers to argumentation in which one uses certain information to reach a conclusion, but where it is possible that adding some further information to those very same premises could make one want to retract the original conclusion. It is easily seen that the informal notion of default reasoning manifests a type of nonmonotonic reasoning. Generally speaking, default statements are said to be true about the class of objects they describe, despite the acknowledged existence of “exceptional instances” of the class. In the absence of explicit information that an object is one of the exceptions we are enjoined to apply the default statement to the object. But further information may later tell us that the object is in fact one of the exceptions. So this is one of the points where nonmonotonicity resides in default reasoning. The informal notion has been seen as central to a number of areas of scholarly investigation, and we canvass some of them before turning our attention to its role in AI. It is because ordinary people so cleverly and effortlessly use default reasoning to solve interesting cognitive tasks that nonmonotonic formalisms were introduced into AI, and we argue that this is a form of psychologism, despite the fact that it is not usually recognized as such in AI. We close by mentioning some of the results from our empirical investigations that we believe should be incorporated into nonmonotonic formalisms.     

Third-party support for strike action

Labor strikes are often seen as battles for public support. Members of the public are asked to show respect for a strike by refusing to cross the picket line or by joining strikers on the picket line. Such public support may affect the morale of strikers and influence the strike's duration. Despite the perceived importance of the public in labor disputes, members of third parties have not been considered in previous strike research. In 2 studies, the authors show that a new measure of third-party strike support is unidimensional and highly reliable. In both cases, union attitudes and perceptions of distributive justice were significant predictors of support for strike action. Those who are more supportive of unions in general and believe that the contract offered to the strikers was unfair were more likely to support the strike by engaging in such actions as conversing with strikers, writing letters, and refusing to cross the picket line.     

Two Cheers for “Closeness”: Terror, Targeting and Double Effect

Philosophers from Hart to Lewis, Johnston and Bennett have expressed various degrees of reservation concerning the doctrine of double effect. A common concern is that, with regard to many activities that double effect is traditionally thought to prohibit, what might at first look to be a directly intended bad effect is really, on closer examination, a directly intended neutral effect that is closely connected to a foreseen bad effect. This essay examines the extent to which the commonsense concept of intention supports a reasonably consistent and coherent application of double effect. Two important conclusions are these: (1) a number of traditionally proscribed activities involve a kind of “targeting” of innocents that can be taken to exhibit a direct intention to harm them; (2) a direct intention to harm need not involve a desire to harm in any ordinary sense of the latter expression. Thanks to Thomas Flint, Paul Benacerraf, Mark Johnston, Gilbert Harman, Tom Cavanaugh, Jorge Garcia, Robert Audi and an anonymous referee for useful discussion and written comments.     

Decomposition of repetition priming components in picture naming

Cognitive mechanisms underlying repetition priming in picture naming were decomposed in several experiments. Sets of encoding manipulations meant to selectively prime or reduce priming in object identification or word production components of picture naming were combined factorially to dissociate processes underlying priming in picture naming. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 were conducted with Spanish-English bilingual participants and bilingual materials. Experiments 4, 5A, and 5B were single-language experiments in English or Spanish. A simple process model was used to formalize the theoretical predictions and test them across all experiments simultaneously. Object identification and word production processes were selectively influenced in an additive manner, which suggests that the 2 sets of processes are independent and sequential. The patterns of facilitation support a quantitative model of transfer-appropriate processing in which shared processes from encoding to test are the causal basis and speeded processes are the mechanism of facilitation.     

Ethical aspects of HIV/AIDS prevention strategies and control in Malawi

HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns have been overshadowed by conflicting, competing, and contradictory views between those who support condom use as a last resort and those who are against it for fear of promoting sexual immorality. We argue that abstinence and faithfulness to one partner are the best available moral solutions to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Of course, deontologists may argue that condom use might appear useful and effective in controlling HIV/AIDS; however, not everything that is useful is always good. In principle, all schools of thought and faith seem to agree on the question of faithfulness for married couples and abstinence for those who are not married. But they differ on condom use. On the ground, the situation is far more complex. We simply lack a single, entirely reliable way to resolve all disagreements regarding HIV/AIDS prevention strategies.

HIV/AIDS reduces the relevance of the principle of individual medical confidentiality among the Bantu people of Southern Africa

The principle of individual medical confidentiality is one of the moral principles that Africa inherited unquestioningly from the West as part of Western medicine. The HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa has reduced the relevance of the principle of individual medical confidentiality. Individual medical confidentiality has especially presented challenges for practitioners among the Bantu communities that are well known for their social inter-connectedness and the way they value their extended family relations. Individual confidentiality has raised several unforeseen problems for persons living with HIV/AIDS, ranging from stigma and isolation to feelings of dejection as it drives them away from their families as a way of trying to keep information about their conditions confidential. The involvement of family members in treatment decisions is in line with the philosophy of Ubuntu and serves to respect patients’ and families’ autonomy while at the same time benefiting the individual patient.     

Routine third party disclosure of HIV results to identifiable sexual partners in Sub-Saharan Africa

The challenges of dealing with disclosure of HIV status cause frustration to health care providers and counselors. This frustration follows from the already known high risk to the third party on one hand and our ethical obligation to “respect persons” in terms of privacy and confidentiality on the other side. Given the stubbornly low rates of voluntary disclosure (partner notification) among couples, however, it is quite tempting to suggest a paradigm of routine third party disclosure to identifiable sexual partners by health care providers. This might be the lesser of the two evils and might give better public health outcomes in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa.