The moral status of a human fetus: a response to Lee.

It is an undeniable empirical fact that a human fetus is a member of the species homo sapiens from the moment of conception. There is thus an important sense in which it is a human being in itself, and not simply part of a pregnant woman's body, despite what defenders of abortion on demand might want us to think. It is also reasonable to suppose that all human beings, and thus human fetuses, are persons, with all that entails, but this is a metaphysical presupposition as opposed to an empirical fact, and is thus contentious. It is argued, however, that this should be of little comfort to the defenders of abortion, because the mere fact that human fetuses have an inherent tendency to become persons is sufficient reason to confer a moral status upon them, which renders abortion morally problematic at best.     

Contributions of volumetrics of the hippocampus and thalamus to verbal memory in temporal lobe epilepsy patients

Recent theories have posited that the hippocampus and thalamus serve distinct, yet related, roles in episodic memory. Whereas the hippocampus has been implicated in long-term memory encoding and storage, the thalamus, as a whole, has been implicated in the selection of items for subsequent encoding and the use of retrieval strategies. However, dissociating the memory impairment that occurs following thalamic injury as distinguished from that following hippocampal injury has proven difficult. This study examined relationships between MRI volumetric measures of the hippocampus and thalamus and their contributions to prose and rote verbal memory functioning in 18 patients with intractable temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Results revealed that bilateral hippocampal and thalamic volume independently predicted delayed prose verbal memory functioning. However, bilateral hippocampal, but not thalamic, volume predicted delayed rote verbal memory functioning. Follow-up analyses indicated that bilateral thalamic volume independently predicted immediate prose, but not immediate rote, verbal recall, whereas bilateral hippocampal volume was not associated with any of these immediate memory measures. These findings underscore the cognitive significance of thalamic atrophy in chronic TLE, demonstrating that hippocampal and thalamic volume make quantitatively, and perhaps qualitatively, distinct contributions to episodic memory functioning in TLE patients. They are also consistent with theories proposing that the hippocampus supports long-term memory encoding and storage, whereas the thalamus is implicated in the executive aspects of episodic memory.     

Examining the Role of Applicant Faking in Hiring Decisions: Percentage of Fakers Hired and Hiring Discrepancies in Single- and Multiple-Predictor Selection

Purpose  

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of applicant faking on personnel selection outcomes (fakers hired and hiring discrepancies) across single-predictor (conscientiousness alone) and multiple-predictor (combinations of conscientiousness and cognitive ability) selection methods.     

Event and story structure recall by children with specific learning disabilities,language impairments,and normally achieving children

This study investigated the ability of children with specific learning disabilities (SLD), children with language impairments (LI), and children who are normally achieving (NA) to recall the events and story structures of a narrative and an expository text. Effects of group, verbal age, text structure, and order of presentation on recall as measured through listening comprehension were studied. Sixty students who were matched on verbal age served as subjects. Results suggested differences between the LI and SLD groups on text recall. Differences were also evident for text type, with recall of narrative text typically being superior to recall of expository text. In general, the performance of the group with SLD was similar to that of the NA group.     

School Climate as “Social Order” and “Social Action”: A Multi-Level Analysis of Public Elementary School Student Perceptions

The present study employed a sample of 25,087 students enrolled in 117 elementary schools to test whether student perceptions obtained in a general survey of school learning and social environment conformed to the dimensions of Stockard and Mayberry's (1992) conceptual framework for school climate, and whether data could be summarized as grouped (school) or non-grouped (individual) data. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that the proposed framework adequately fits student perceptions of school climate. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses showed between-school differences. Although school membership accounted for a small amount of variance in school climate measures, school climate means showed relatively high reliability. School climate dimensions most immediate to the student (Action-Instrumental support and Action-Expressive support) showed the strongest relations to both student self-reported academic performance and student satisfaction, and these relations were generally the same across the schools. As predicted, expressive support as opposed to instrumental support was more beneficial (in terms of self-reported academic performance) to students in schools having proportionally more socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Implications of results for educational research and educational practice regarding school climate are discussed.     

Media Effects and Communication Bias in Diverse Groups

This paper extends research on factors influencing effective communication in diverse groups. The effects of social group membership on attention and influence were examined using 17 groups of three men and three women. Each group discussed a controversial topic face-to-face or using either an anonymous or an identified group support system environment. Social group membership biased both attention and influence; these effects were eliminated when discussions were conducted electronically—even when social group membership of participants was identifiable in the electronic media.     

Structure and provision of services in Black churches in New Haven, Connecticut

Historically, Black (or African American) churches have played a central role as a center of religious and political life and also as a provider of human services and a healing community. This article examined the extent to which African American churches in 1 Northeastern urban environment are involved in the delivery of health and human service programs to their communities. It also explored how comfortable Black clergy are in referring their parishioners to the formal mental health system and identified the actual level of referrals. In addition, the analyses considered the individual and organizational characteristics that predict variations in the levels of support services and the likelihood of referral. Analyses revealed that African American churches deliver a broad range of services to the community. More than two thirds of the clergy feel comfortable in making a referral to a mental health agency or professional, and more than half have actually made a referral. Both service delivery and referral levels varied by several clergy and congregational characteristics. The implications of these findings for research and health policy are considered.     

A Survey of Career Development in Corporations

The article describes a survey that examined career development programs in 118 Fortune 500 Corporations. It reports first the characteristics of the career development service providers. The services themselves can be divided into directly job-related career planning services, and those not so directly related, such as life planning and counseling services. The services offered by the corporations are compared for frequency among corporations and length of time offered. Based on the survey, Griffith draws conclusions concerning the extent of career development practiced within major corporations.     

The effects of clozapine on delayed spatial alternation deficits in rats with hippocampal damage

Clozapine is an atypical antipsychotic drug that has been shown to improve spatial memory in some animal models; however its efficacy in reversing spatial memory impairment in rats with hippocampal lesions is unknown. To address this issue, we tested the effects of clozapine on delayed spatial alternation deficits in rats with hippocampal damage in three separate experiments. In each experiment, adult male rats received sham surgery or direct stereotaxic infusions of the excitotoxin, NMDA, into the hippocampus. In the first study, seven days after surgery, the sham control animals received daily saline injections while the lesioned animals were split into two groups that received daily saline or clozapine (2.0 mg/kg, sc) injections. During the fifth week of injections, all animals were tested in a food-motivated delayed spatial alternation task. Saline-treated rats with excitotoxic hippocampal damage displayed significant deficits in delayed spatial alternation. Daily clozapine injections completely reversed this deficit. In a second experiment, it was found that clozapine treatment limited to the testing days only did not improve alternation performance in lesioned rats. Finally, in a third experiment, chronic clozapine treatment did not improve alternation performance in lesioned rats that were pre-trained in the alternation task prior to surgery. These results suggest that chronic, but not acute, clozapine treatment enables rats with hippocampal damage to develop new spatial learning, but can not rescue old spatial learning established prior to damage. These results may have implications for the treatment of cognitive deficits caused by hippocampal dysfunction in disorders such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, and others.