Pragmatic Encroachment and Moral Encroachment

Subject‐sensitive invariantism posits surprising connections between a person's knowledge and features of her environment that are not paradigmatically epistemic features. But which features of a person's environment have this distinctive connection to knowledge? Traditional defenses of subject‐sensitive invariantism emphasize features that matter to the subject of the knowledge‐attribution. Call this pragmatic encroachment. A more radical thesis usually goes ignored: knowledge is sensitive to moral facts, whether or not those moral facts matter to the subject. Call this moral encroachment. This article argues that, insofar as there are good arguments for pragmatic encroachment, there are also good arguments for moral encroachment.     

What Are Applied Ethics?

This paper explores the relationships that various applied ethics bear to each other, both in particular disciplines and more generally. The introductory section lays out the challenge of coming up with such an account and, drawing a parallel with the philosophy of science, offers that applied ethics may either be unified or disunified. The second section develops one simple account through which applied ethics are unified, vis-à-vis ethical theory. However, this is not taken to be a satisfying answer, for reasons explained. In the third section, specific applied ethics are explored: biomedical ethics; business ethics; environmental ethics; and neuroethics. These are chosen not to be comprehensive, but rather for their traditions or other illustrative purposes. The final section draws together the results of the preceding analysis and defends a disunity conception of applied ethics.     

Cultural-Related, Contextual, and Asthma-Specific Risks Associated with Asthma Morbidity in Urban Children

The objective of this study was to examine associations between specific dimensions of the multi-dimensional cumulative risk index (CRI) and asthma morbidity in urban, school-aged children from African American, Latino and Non-Latino White backgrounds. An additional goal of the study was to identify the proportion of families that qualify for high-risk status on each dimension of the CRI by ethnic group. A total of 264 children with asthma, ages 7–15 (40% female; 76% ethnic minority) and their primary caregivers completed interview-based questionnaires assessing cultural, contextual, and asthma-specific risks that can impact asthma morbidity. Higher levels of asthma-related risks were associated with more functional morbidity for all groups of children, despite ethnic group background. Contextual and cultural risk dimensions contributed to more morbidity for African-American and Latino children. Analyses by Latino ethnic subgroup revealed that contextual and cultural risks are significantly related to more functional morbidity for Puerto Rican children compared to Dominican children. Findings suggest which type of risks may more meaningfully contribute to variations in asthma morbidity for children from specific ethnic groups. These results can inform culturally sensitive clinical interventions for urban children with asthma whose health outcomes lag far behind their non-Latino White counterparts.     

Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Consumer Behavior

This article describes a dual‐system model of consumer behavior. This model is based on the assumption that all human behaviors are a joint function of reflective and impulsive mechanisms. Those mechanisms have different principles of operation but contribute to the act of buying. However, the relative contribution of impulsive and reflective processes depends on personal and contextual circumstances. The operation and interaction of the 2 systems at different stages of information processing is described and applied to the dynamics of consumer behavior, with a special emphasis on impulse buying.     

Separating the influences of escape and access to preferred activities on problem behavior occurring in instructional contexts

Two individuals with developmental disabilities were observed to engage in destructive behavior when demands were presented, suggesting that the behaviors were maintained by negative reinforcement. Subsequent analyses revealed that (i) the behavior problems persisted when the participants were asked to cease a high‐probability, ongoing activity (walking) while demands were not presented and (ii) problem behaviors ceased when the participants were trained to request access to walking through appropriate means. These findings suggested that the presentation of demands, per se, was not the critical variable in maintaining destructive behavior. Rather, it appeared that restricting the participants from walking, which was only coincidentally necessary in the initiation of demands, set the occasion for the aberrant responses. Subsequent analyses were conducted with one participant to further strengthen this hypothesis. These findings are discussed in terms of the utility of seeking out idiosyncratic and individualized behavioral functions subsequent to initial assessments and their contribution to the growing body of literature regarding the complex interactions of destructive behavior and other naturally occurring high‐rate behaviors. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Application of Latent Semantic Analysis to Divergent Thinking is Biased by Elaboration

Scoring divergent‐thinking response sets has always been challenging because such responses are not only open‐ended in terms of number of ideas, but each idea may also be expressed by a varying number of concepts and, thus, by a varying number of words (elaboration). While many current studies have attempted to score the semantic distance in divergent‐thinking responses by applying latent semantic analysis (LSA), it is known from other areas of research that LSA‐based approaches are biased according to the number of words in a response. Thus, the current article aimed to identify and demonstrate this elaboration bias in LSA‐based divergent‐thinking scores by means of a simulation. In addition, we show that this elaboration bias can be reduced by removing the stop words (for example, and, or, for and so forth) prior to analysis. Furthermore, the residual bias after stop word removal can be reduced by simulation‐based corrections. Finally, we give an empirical illustration for alternate uses and consequences tasks. Results suggest that when both stop word removal and simulation‐based bias correction are applied, convergent validity should be expected to be highest.