SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND ETHICS: A RESPONSE TO MICHAEL J. REISS

The respondent agrees with Michael Reiss's general diagnosis of the rudderless state of ethics in our modern society, but not with all of his account of its causes or possible solutions. Scripture has always been limited in terms of direct moral commands, and secular ethics has, since Aristotle at least, been influential in directing Christian understanding of the “good life.” Ethics must be based in biology, but evolutionary biology can tell us more readily what is, than guide us into “what ought” to be. Christian teaching classically emphasized moral formation, grounded in the understanding that we are creatures of a good Creator. We have our being as gift, and human life flourishes when oriented to the Good.     

Church-based health behavior programs: Using social cognitive theory to formulate interventions for at-risk populations

Epidemiological analyses conclude that the major contributors to all-cause premature mortality and morbidity are smoking, alcohol abuse, inappropriate diet, and a sedentary lifestyle. Efforts to modify these health behaviors in populations with community and worksite interventions, although initially promising, have had difficulty in sustaining health-behavior changes. More intensive, theoretically based interventions targeted to at-risk groups and delivered in smaller social units, such as churches and other religious organizations, have been recommended. An intervention based on social cognitive theory that entails integrating self-regulatory procedures with social and environmental supports in rural churches serving people from lower socioeconomic groups is described in detail.     

Beyond Death: The Treatment of Indigenous Human Remains—a Human Rights Perspective

Indigenous human remains that have been disinterred and removed (often overseas) without the permission of the descendants of the deceased fall within the broader category of movable cultural heritage. It is accepted that the rights associated with culture as well as certain other human rights—such as freedom of expression and association—are applicable directly to cultural heritage. When considering the human rights dimension of the treatment of indigenous human remains, it is vital to appreciate that for indigeneous peoples the bodies of their ancestors represent an important spiritual heritage as well as being an essential element in their sense of identity. Therefore, both their religious practices (which may include the worship of their ancestors) and their right to cultural identity (and the associated material heritage) should be respected. Most legal systems have laws that prohibit the disturbance of burial grounds, although it is not uncommon for old burial grounds to be turned over to other purposes. For indigenous peoples, both the dead and their burial grounds remain sacred even after thousands of years. The potential for conflict between the wider social importance of indigenous human remains as repositories of scientific information and their special significance to the indigenous community concerned is strong. This raises important ethical questions for anthropologists and museum curators in relation to the treatment of indigenous human remains.     

The impact of individual trauma symptoms of deployed soldiers on relationship satisfaction.

Research traditionally has focused on the development of individual symptoms in those who experienced trauma directly but has overlooked the interpersonal impact of trauma. The current study reports data from 45 male Army soldiers who recently returned from a military deployment to Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) or Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and their female spouses/partners. The results indicated that increased trauma symptoms, particularly sleep problems, dissociation, and severe sexual problems, in the soldiers significantly predicted lower marital/relationship satisfaction for both soldiers and their female partners. The results suggest that individual trauma symptoms negatively impact relationship satisfaction in military couples in which the husband has been exposed to war trauma.     

Loss of control over eating reflects eating disturbances and general psychopathology

This study examined the clinical significance of the loss of control over eating as a key component of eating disorders. It investigated the association of eating-related psychopathology and general psychopathology with objective bulimic episodes (OBEs; experiencing a loss of control while consuming large amounts of food) and subjective bulimic episodes (SBEs; experiencing a loss of control while consuming small/moderate amounts). A community sample of 81 women with a range of disordered eating was recruited: binge-eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, subclinical eating disturbances, or no eating disorders. They were interviewed using the Eating Disorder Examination and completed measures of eating-related and general psychopathology. Both OBE and SBE frequencies correlated significantly with measures of eating-related and general psychopathology, and no significant differences were found between the magnitudes of the correlations with either binge episode type. SBE frequency significantly and independently predicted global eating disorder psychopathology. The loss of control over eating, without consuming large amounts of food, was as closely associated with specific eating disorder psychopathology and general mental health as were traditionally defined OBEs. SBEs may be an important target of treatment and should be considered for future diagnostic classifications of eating disorders.     

Principles of cognitive science in education: The effects of generation,errors, and feedback

Principles of cognitive science hold the promise of helping children to study more effectively, yet they do not always make successful transitions from the laboratory to applied settings and have rarely been tested in such settings. For example, self-generation of answers to questions should help children to remember. But what if children cannot generate anything? And what if they make an error? Do these deviations from the laboratory norm of perfect generation hurt, and, if so, do they hurt enough that one should, in practice, spurn generation? Can feedback compensate, or are errors catastrophic? The studies reviewed here address three interlocking questions in an effort to better implement a computer-based study program to help children learn: (1) Does generation help? (2) Do errors hurt if they are corrected? And (3) what is the effect of feedback? The answers to these questions are: Yes, generation helps; no, surprisingly, errors that are corrected do not hurt; and, finally, feedback is beneficial in verbal learning. These answers may help put cognitive scientists in a better position to put their well-established principles in the service of children’s learning.     

The role of adolescent IQ and gender in the use of cognitive support for remembering in aging

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of adolescent IQ (AIQ) and gender in older adults' ability to use cognitive support to enhance memory. Subjects were 269 mid-1940s graduates of the same high school. Adolescent IQ scores were gathered from archives, and subjects' memory for words was tested with tasks that provided increasing cognitive support. Overall, subjects benefited from support; women recalled more words than men; and persons with a high AIQ remembered more words than persons with a lower AIQ. However, while all subjects showed gains from cognitive support, men with a lower AIQ performed worse than men with a high AIQ. Women's performance was not dependent on their AIQ. Analysis of qualitative memory indicators suggested that women and persons with a high AIQ had better encoding and retrieval operations. Men with a lower AIQ appear to be particularly vulnerable to memory deficits in aging. This may be due to low "cognitive reserve" or generally poorer episodic memory function.     

Real-time comprehension of wh- movement in aphasia: evidence from eyetracking while listening

Sentences with non-canonical wh- movement are often difficult for individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia to understand (, inter alia). However, the explanation of this difficulty remains controversial, and little is known about how individuals with aphasia try to understand such sentences in real time. This study uses an eyetracking while listening paradigm to examine agrammatic aphasic individuals' on-line comprehension of movement sentences. Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they listened to brief stories and looked at visual displays depicting elements mentioned in the stories. The stories were followed by comprehension probes involving wh- movement. In line with previous results for young normal listeners [Sussman, R. S., & Sedivy, J. C. (2003). The time-course of processing syntactic dependencies: evidence from eye movements. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 143-161], the study finds that both older unimpaired control participants (n=8) and aphasic individuals (n=12) showed visual evidence of successful automatic comprehension of wh- questions (like "Who did the boy kiss that day at school?"). Specifically, both groups fixated on a picture corresponding to the moved element ("who," the person kissed in the story) at the position of the verb. Interestingly, aphasic participants showed qualitatively different fixation patterns for trials eliciting correct and incorrect responses. Aphasic individuals looked first to the moved-element picture and then to a competitor following the verb in the incorrect trials. However, they only showed looks to the moved-element picture for the correct trials, parallel to control participants. Furthermore, aphasic individuals' fixations during movement sentences were just as fast as control participants' fixations. These results are unexpected under slowed-processing accounts of aphasic comprehension deficits, in which the source of failed comprehension should be delayed application of the same processing routines used in successful comprehension. This pattern is also unexpected if aphasic individuals are using qualitatively different strategies than normals to comprehend such sentences, as under impaired-representation accounts of agrammatism. Instead, it suggests that agrammatic aphasic individuals may process wh- questions similarly to unimpaired individuals, but that this process often fails to facilitate off-line comprehension of sentences with wh- movement.