Delineating paternalism in pediatric care

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - Paternalism in the medical care of children is appropriate and ethically justifiable. However, dilemmatic disagreement by paternalistic agents as to which...     

Pi ka pu: The perception of speech sounds by prelinguistic infants

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Experimentation with 14–18-week-old infants indicates that they are capable of grouping together syllables of English depending on whether the...     

The development of conceptual and rote recall skills among school age children

One hundred eighty children from Grades K, 5, and 9 performed a recall task within one of four instructional conditions: serial recall; standard free recall; labeling free recall; labeling cued recall. The task required that Ss view and recall items from three successively presented sets of categorized pieture stimuli. Controls were imposed upon the associatice relatedness of items within sets so as to minimize the occurrence of associative responding during recall. The clustering data showed that kindergarten and fifth grade children are able to use conceptual skills to effectively mediate recall, but fail to effect these skills on a spontaneous basis in free recall. The results were discussed in line with the hypothesis that young children fail to engage in planful cognitive activity in recall tasks.     

Attending to social vulnerability when rationing pandemic resources

Pandemic plans are increasingly attending to groups experiencing health disparities and other social vulnerabilities. Although some pandemic guidance is silent on the issue, guidance that attends to socially vulnerable groups ranges widely, some procedural (often calling for public engagement), and some substantive. Public engagement objectives vary from merely educational to seeking reflective input into the ethical commitments that should guide pandemic planning and response. Some plans that concern rationing during a severe pandemic recommend ways to protect socially vulnerable groups without prioritizing access to scarce resources based on social vulnerability per se. The Minnesota Pandemic Ethics Project (MPEP), a public engagement project on rationing scarce health resources during a severe influenza pandemic, agrees and recommends an integrated set of ways to attend to the needs of socially vulnerable people and avoid exacerbation of health disparities during a severe influenza pandemic. Among other things, MPEP recommends: 1. Engaging socially vulnerable populations to clarify unique needs and effective strategies; 2. Engaging socially vulnerable populations to elicit ethical values and perspectives on rationing; 3. Rejecting rationing based on race, socioeconomic class, citizenship, quality of life, length of life-extension and first-come, first-served; 4. Prioritizing those in the general population for access to resources based on combinations of risk (of death or severe complications from influenza, exposure to influenza, transmitting influenza to vulnerable groups) and the likelihood of responding well to the resource in question. 5. Protecting critical infrastructures on which vulnerable populations and the general public rely; 6. Identifying and removing access barriers during pandemic planning and response; and 7. Collecting and promptly analyzing data during the pandemic to identify groups at disproportionate risk of influenza-related mortality and serious morbidity and to optimize the distribution of resources.     

Representing the meanings of object and action words: the featural and unitary semantic space hypothesis

This paper presents the Featural and Unitary Semantic Space (FUSS) hypothesis of the meanings of object and action words. The hypothesis, implemented in a statistical model, is based on the following assumptions: First, it is assumed that the meanings of words are grounded in conceptual featural representations, some of which are organized according to modality. Second, it is assumed that conceptual featural representations are bound into lexico-semantic representations that provide an interface between conceptual knowledge and other linguistic information (syntax and phonology). Finally, the FUSS model employs the same principles and tools for objects and actions, modeling both domains in a single semantic space. We assess the plausibility of the model by showing that it can capture generalizations presented in the literature, in particular those related to category-related deficits, and show that it can predict semantic effects in behavioral experiments for object and action words better than other models such as Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and similarity metrics derived from Wordnet (Miller & Fellbaum, 1991).     

Toward a Constructivist and Developmental Identity for the Counseling Profession: The Context-Phase-Stage-Style Model

The constructivist and developmental metatheories offer foundations for prevention- and health-oriented counseling approaches that target the whole population. In the assessment model proposed here, the counselor is directed toward 4 specific dimensions of human construction and development. They are the following: social context, life phase, constructive stage, and personality style. It is proposed that such assessment be infused into everyday counseling practice in schools, mental health settings, and colleges while also being a ground for the counselor education curriculum.     

Virtue Ethics, Theory, and Warrant

Are there good grounds for thinking that the moral values of action are to be derived from those of character? This ‘virtue ethical’ claim is sometimes thought of as a kind of normative ethical theory; sometimes as form of opposition to any such theory. However, the best case to be made for it supports neither of these claims. Rather, it leads us to a distinctive view in moral epistemology: the view that my warrant for a particular moral judgement derives from my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge. This view seems to confront a regress-problem. For the belief that I am a good moral judge is itself a particular moral judgement. So it seems that, on this view, I need to derive my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge from my warrant for believing that I am a good judge of moral judges; and so on. I show how this worry can be met, and trace the implications of the resulting view for warranted moral judgement.