Board oversight of community benefit: an ethical imperative

Board oversight of community benefit responsibility in tax-exempt organizations in the nonprofit health care sector is attracting considerable attention. Scrutiny by the IRS and other official bodies has led to stricter measures of compliance with the community benefit standard. But stricter compliance does not sufficiently engage the underlying ethical imperative for boards to provide effective oversight--an imperative that recent research suggests has not been sufficiently honored. This analysis considers why there is a distinctively ethical imperative for board oversight, the organizational nature of the imperative involved, and practical ways to fulfill its obligations. We adopt an organizational ethics paradigm to illuminate the constituent components of the ethical imperative and to clarify emerging benchmarks as flexible guidelines. As these emerging benchmarks enhance board oversight of community benefit they also can shed light on what it means to be a virtuous organization.     

Halt and recovery of illusory motion perception from peripherally viewed static images

We quantitatively investigated the halt and recovery of illusory motion perception in static images. With steady fixation, participants viewed images causing four different motion illusions. The results showed that the time courses of the Fraser-Wilcox illusion and the modified Fraser-Wilcox illusion (i.e., "Rotating Snakes") were very similar, while the Ouchi and Enigma illusions showed quite a different trend. When participants viewed images causing the Fraser-Wilcox illusion and the modified Fraser-Wilcox illusion, they typically experienced disappearance of the illusory motion within several seconds. After a variable interstimulus interval (ISI), the images were presented again in the same retinal position. The magnitude of the illusory motion from the second image presentation increased as the ISI became longer. This suggests that the same adaptation process either directly causes or attenuates both the Fraser-Wilcox illusion and the modified Fraser-Wilcox illusion.     

Sustained Effects of Incredible Years as a Preventive Intervention in Preschool Children with Conduct Problems

The present study evaluated preventive effects of the Incredible Years program for parents of preschool children who were at risk for a chronic pattern of conduct problems, in the Netherlands. In a matched control design, 72 parents of children with conduct problems received the Incredible Years program. These families (intervention group) were compared with 72 families who received care as usual (control group). Two years after termination of the intervention, it appeared that observed and selfrated parenting skills were significantly improved in the intervention group. Likewise, in this group, observed child conduct problems showed sustained intervention effects. The decrease in observed critical parenting mediated the decrease in observed child conduct problems over time. In addition, it appeared that parental influence increased over time.     

The Other in Dreams

After examining the identity issues in Freud's Irma dream, Erik Erikson (1954) concludes that workable dream solutions may be not only ego-syntonic but also ethno-syntonic. Dreams may therefore open a window onto private, unconscious perceptions of the especially significant others upon whom we depend for security and satisfaction. The author examines a number of dream texts from this angle. Through these examples, he illustrates the way in which dreams may depict a person's sense of unconscious connection and responsibility to family, to community, and, in special cases, to one's nation. Dream life may thus illuminate a person's unconscious citizenship.     

Younger and older adults' use of mental models as representations for text materials

Recent work suggests that formation and use of mental model (representations of situations described) is an integral part of discourse comprehension. In an experiment comparing younger and older adults on this aspect of text comprehension, subjects heard readings of a list of sentences and took a forced-choice recognition test. The test contained 2 types of distractors with an equal degree of verbatim similarity to the target sentences. One type described the same situation as the corresponding target sentence; the other did not. If mental models are an integral part of text representation formed at encoding, then a large number of confusions of the first, but not the second, type of distractor with the target sentence would be obtained. Younger and older adults showed this pattern to equal degrees. These data are consistent with those indicating that linguistic competence remains stable over the adult years (cf. Light, 1988).     

Language,cultural psychology,and family therapy: Japanese examples from an international perspective

Psychotherapists may find the study of foreign languages valuable in understanding the cultural psychology of relationships. The logic and grammar of the language used to form relationships may offer some insight into how relationships breakdown and can be restored in psychotherapy. Language and thought are inseparable in the Whorf and Sapir hypothesis.This paper illustrates how other-centeredness, indirection, indecision, and apology are embedded in Japanese grammar and become the foundation for Japanese relationships. Two other central ideas of Japanese culture,Amae (interdependency) andOmote/Ura (public and private selves), are also presented with implications for presenting complaints, therapeutic relationships, and treatment techniques.Revised version of a paper presented at the American Family Therapy Assoc, Washington, DC, June, 1986.     

Dichotic listening following idiopathic precocious puberty: Speech processing capacity and temporal efficiency

Eleven right-handed adolescent females with a history of idiopathic precocious puberty (IPP) were compared to 11 pair-matched normal controls of similar maturational status. They were tested on a dichotic consonant-vowel (CV) discrimination task in which syllables were presented simultaneously to the two ears or with an interaural delay of 30 or 60 msec. The IPP and control groups did not differ: (1) in right-ear advantages; (2) in double-correct or total correct measures of accuracy; or (3) in "lag effects." The findings provide further evidence that timing of puberty--maturation rate--is not related to verbal ability or lateralization in adolescent females.     

Structural complexity of motor patterns: A study on reaction times and movement times of handwritten letters

This study investigates the effects of psychomotor complexity on latencies for beginning to write single letters and numerals, and on times taken to complete the first strokes of letters and numerals. An experiment measured simple and choice reaction times for writing homogeneous graphemes (i.e., letters or numerals made up of similar strokes) and for writing heterogeneous graphemes (i.e., characters made up of dissimilar strokes). It was assumed that the motor programme for writing a letter is retrieved from long-term memory and briefly held, until it is used, in a short-term buffer store. The experiment examined the hypothesis that it is more difficult to read out homogeneous than heterogeneous stroke-structures from this store. For three out of four allographic grapheme pairs, homogeneous graphemes required longer initiation times or longer movement times for completion of the first stroke than did heterogeneous graphemes. These results are discussed in relation to recent findings on motor programming based on the use of reaction-time paradigms.