Right-Based Morality and Hohfeld's Relations

The paper begins by defending the Hohfeldianaccount of rights (as equivalence relations) from thecharge that it cannot capture their specialsignificance, and thus cannot be used in a right-basedmoral theory. It goes on to argue that, because of amisunderstanding of this relational account, theconception of right-based morality that has emerged inrecent years has been variously flawed from theoutset. A particular form of explanatory priority waswrongly taken to be essential, and then eitherincoherently combined with equivalence, or taken to bea reason for rejecting equivalence where right-basedthinking is concerned. In fact, this form of priorityis not sufficient for establishing a right-based moraltheory. It is also not necessary, since theHohfeldian analysis can be shown to be entirelyadequate to meeting the original aims of thoseproposing this approach to ethics.     

Article for “Diversity Stories in Community Research and Action” Facing Resistance in Waking Up to Privilege

This article identifies a challenge brought to us while facilitating a diversity workshop with adults in a school work setting. Our program involved using the video The Color of Fear as a centerpiece of a training to school district staff where the goals were to raise awareness and understanding of race, gender and class issues, increase understanding of power and privilege, and build alliances between people from diverse backgrounds. The challenge came from a white, male participant and involved issues of privilege, the intersections of race, class, and gender, and resistance to addressing diversity matters. Reflections of what worked and didn't work are offered as well as recommendations to other facilitators who will face similar challenges.     

The unified theory of repression

Repression has become an empirical fact that is at once obvious and problematic. Fragmented clinical and laboratory traditions and disputed terminology have resulted in a Babel of misunderstandings in which false distinctions are imposed (e.g., between repression and suppression) and necessary distinctions not drawn (e.g., between the mechanism and the use to which it is put, defense being just one). "Repression" was introduced by Herbart to designate the (nondefensive) inhibition of ideas by other ideas in their struggle for consciousness. Freud adapted repression to the defensive inhibition of "unbearable" mental contents. Substantial experimental literatures on attentional biases, thought avoidance, interference, and intentional forgetting exist, the oldest prototype being the work of Ebbinghaus, who showed that intentional avoidance of memories results in their progressive forgetting over time. It has now become clear, as clinicians had claimed, that the inaccessible materials are often available and emerge indirectly (e.g., procedurally, implicitly). It is also now established that the Ebbinghaus retention function can be partly reversed, with resulting increases of conscious memory over time (hypermnesia). Freud's clinical experience revealed early on that exclusion from consciousness was effected not just by simple repression (inhibition) but also by a variety of distorting techniques, some deployed to degrade latent contents (denial), all eventually subsumed under the rubric of defense mechanisms ("repression in the widest sense"). Freudian and Bartlettian distortions are essentially the same, even in name, except for motive (cognitive vs. emotional), and experimentally induced false memories and other "memory illusions" are laboratory analogs of self-induced distortions.     

Exploration of Environmental and Genetic Risk Factors for Alzheimer’s Disease: The Value of Cross-Cultural Studies

Advances in molecular genetics have revolutionized epidemiological research. It is now possible to combine the techniques of population genetics with research on risk factors to construct genetic-environmental interactive models that explain geographic-ethnic variations in disease rates. Cross-cultural studies involving populations from developing and developed countries offer a unique opportunity for constructing these models by providing a wide diversity of environmental exposures. Results from a comparative Indianapolis-Ibadan study suggest that Alzheimer’s disease incidence rates are lower in Yoruba than in African Americans and that these lower rates may be due to a combination of genetic and environmental, primarily dietary, influences.     

The internet, cyberporn, and sexual exploitation of children: Media moral panics and urban myths for middle-class parents?

The Internet as a popular media is not even one decade old. From its early days of wide access, concern with the dangers posed to children and teens has been a staple of news media and moral entrepreneurs. Concern with sexual predators, “cyberporn” (or “pornographic” material housed on “nodes” of the World Wide Web) became media-induced moral panics of the mid- and late-1990s. This paper examined the Internet and children in the context of the United States and Australia. Studies of children’s access to the Internet and it’s effects were examined. Particular attention was paid to the aspects of Internet danger as a form of “urban legend” aimed at middle-class parents who are able to provide access to the technology required to access the “dangers” of the Web. The intersection of urban mythology, technological change, and morals campaigns of the 1990s was explored. The role played by concern with the Internet in the on-going history of moral movements and parental responsibility was discussed.     

Source-monitoring judgments about anagrams and their solutions: Evidence for the role of cognitive operations information in memory

Generating solutions to anagrams leads to a memory advantage for those solutions, with generated words remembered better than words simply read. However, an additional advantage is not typically found for solutions to difficult anagrams relative to solutions to easy ones, presenting a challenge for the cognitive effort explanation of the generation effect. In the present series of experiments, the effect of manipulating anagram difficulty is explored further by introducing two new source-monitoring judgments. These studies demonstrate that when attention is directed at test to the operations activated during encoding (by way of source-monitoring judgments focused on solving vs. constructing anagrams), a source advantage is observed for difficult anagrams. However, when attention is directed to the anagrams themselves, asking participants to remember the kinds of anagrams generated or solved (based on kind of rule rather than subjective impressions of difficulty), a similar source advantage is not observed. The present studies bring a new perspective to the investigation of difficulty manipulations on memory for problem solving by illustrating the impact of a shift in focus from the effort mediating cognitive operations to specifics about the cognitive operations themselves.