Using the family life cycle with later life families

The development of a family clinic for later life families within an Old Age Psychiatry service is briefly described. An extended life cycle model has been found useful in understanding and working with such families and is also described, together with two cases which illustrate the practical application of the model.     

Justification and the Processing of Information

This study explores, within the context of escalating commitment, how ambiguous information affects decision making. By analyzing subjects' looking times and allocation decisions, we examined the process by which individuals abstract and use information to arrive at their decisions. We found that subjects spent more time processing ambiguous information than they did either purely optimistic or purely pessimistic information. This tendency to process ambiguous information longer increased when the decision maker was not exonerated from blame for the failure of an original decision; presented with ambiguous information, nonex-onerated subjects also made smaller allocations than did exonerated subjects. In this study, the predominant effect of felt responsibility on allocations was withdrawal rather than escalation. Our results suggest that the ambiguity of information about the future plays an important role in escalation and that the combination of responsibility and failure may affect allocations only when the prospective information is ambiguous.     

The morality of induced delivery of the anencephalic fetus prior to viability

In situations where anencephaly is diagnosed and where the mother's life or health is threatened Roman Catholic hospitals are faced with the dilemma of waiting until viability before inducing the fetus, thus potentially putting the mother at further risk. According to most Roman Catholic ethicists, induced delivery before viability is contrary to the Church's prohibition of direct killing of the innocent. The authors propose for discussion a reconsideration of this position in the case of the anencephalic fetus and conclude that taking the life of such a fetus does not constitute an attack on its personal dignity and therefore is morally permissible.