A Response to G. Scott Davis

This defense of my essay on Vitoria and Suárez argues that my use of the term “religious war” is based on religious authority at least as much as religious cause, and that Davis’s decision to discuss only Vitoria limits his ability to come to terms with my thesis. To Davis’s argument that for Vitoria war was justified against the Indians only as a necessity of simple justice and to protect the innocent, I argue that his disjunction between simple justice and religious cause is a false one that fails to come to term with the church’s primary reason for approaching Indians, with the Thomistic understanding of the relation between nature and grace and between reason and revelation, and with the distinction between what justice requires in relation to the church and Christians and what it requires for others. I explain finally that my claim is not that the Catholic political rulers readily responded to papal calls for war except when it was in their interest, but that papal war was central to the normative just‐war tradition of the church in canon law and among major theologians like Vitoria and Suárez.     

Cholecystokinin elicits the complete behavioral sequence of satiety in rats.

The behavior of intact rats and rats with chronic gastric fistulas was observed and scored during a 60-min test period when they were offered liquid diet after 17 hr of food deprivation. Intact rats and rats with closed fistulas displayed a specific behavioral sequence at the end of each meal: They stopped eating, engaged in grooming and exploration for a short time, and then rested or slept. Thus, a fixed behavioral sequence characterizes satiety in the rat. Although the behavioral sequence of satiety was fixed, the cessation of feeding was not a sufficient condition for the appearance of the rest of the sequence: Quinine adulteration of the liquid diet stopped sham feeding but did not elicit the complete sequence. Intraperitoneal injection of the intestinal hormone cholecystokinin during sham feeding, however, elicited the complete sequence of satiety. The observation that cholecystokinin not only stops feeding but elicits the complete sequence of satiety supports our hypothesis that endogenous cholecystokinin is a satiety signal for the rat.     

Helplessness,stress level,and the coronary-prone behavior pattern

Two experiments were conducted to examine the relationship between stress level and learned helplessness in human subjects. Experiment I subjected subjects to loud or moderate noise in order to induce differential stress. Half of the subjects within each stress group were unable to escape from a series of noise bursts, whereas the other half could terminate each burst by manipulating appropriate switches. After the pretreatment series, the same noise was again delivered to subjects, all of whom could now escape or avoid noise by making an appropriate response on a shuttle box. Inescapable (helplessness) pretreatment interfered with escape learning in the second (test) phase of the study under both levels of stress. Experiment II was a partial replication of the first study using only loud noise. The interference effect during test trials was greater than in the first study. In addition to these findings, measures of a coronary-prone behavior pattern were related to differential susceptibility to the interference effect under both high stress and moderate stress conditions. These results were interpreted in terms of differing perceptions of threat imposed by lack of environmental control.     

Estimating item and order information

In a common psychological procedure, the subject is presented a sequence of items and is asked to recall them in order. His response is scored for items reported correctly in their correct position (position score) and for items reported correctly independently of position (item score). Such data are analyzed in terms of a model which assumes that a particular stimulus item may be forgotten entirely (State 0), may be remembered but without any knowledge of its position in the sequence, or may be remembered together with knowledge of its position (State 2). State 2 is related to the position score, and we define a nonexclusive State 1 (which contains all items not in State 0) that is related to the item score. In Part 1, we use the observed item and position scores to derive estimates of the trial-to-trial distribution of the number of items in States 1 and 2. In Part 2 we consider separately each serial position of the stimulus, and derive estimates of the probability that each individual item is in State 1 and State 2. The model handles omissions, second guesses, and gives sensitive estimates of partial information. Fast Fortran computer programs are available for all computations. In general, whenever responses are scored for items and/or for position, and when no alternative model is being tested, it is recommended that the above model be used to correct for the effects of guessing.     

Prior exercise of freedom and reactance

A communication that contains a particularly strong intent to influence caneasily lose persuasive impact or even bring about a “boomerang” effect. Such “boomerang” phenomena have often been attributed to “psychological reactance”, a motivational state created when freedoms are threatened or usurped. The first experiment reported here examined two factors that inhibited reactance effects. (A) The more that subjects were in initial disagreement with the communicator, the less likely they were to respond with boomerang change to a high pressure communication. (B) Among subjects who initially agreed with the communicator, a successful blocking of reactance effects was produced by asking them to write a short precommunication essay taking a position contrary to the communication. This latter effect was replicated in Experiment II.