Application of Herek's attitudes toward lesbians and gay men scale in The Netherlands

A national sample of 921 respondents from the Dutch population completed the translated, slightly modified version of Herek's Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men Scale, originally developed in the USA for the assessment of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. The present study was the first attempt to test the applicability of the scale in the Netherlands. In line with previous American findings, all scale items loaded highly on one factor. The scores also correlated with another measure of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men, namely, 'denial of equal rights' (r = .76), and with 'traditional view of women' (r = .48), 'importance of traditional marriage' (r = .53), and 'authoritarianism' (r = .31). Data support the scale's acceptable reliability and construct and discriminant validity.     

Dissociations among functional categories in Korean agrammatism

This study investigated the hypothesis that the syntactic trees formed by individuals with agrammatic aphasia cannot be constructed any higher than an impaired node as suggested by the tree-pruning hypothesis (Friedman, 1994; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) and hypothesis. It also examined their following implication that the members of a certain functional category are subject to the same degree of impairment. Two experiments were conducted to investigate a Korean agrammatic patient's use and understanding of three functional categories--Mood, Tense, and Complementizer. The results showed a dissociation among functional categories that preserves the higher node while leaving the lower node impaired both in production and comprehension. Another dissociation was found among members of the same category depending on their linear position in the clause. These results contrast with the predictions of the tree-pruning hypothesis, suggesting that the nearer to the end of the clause a functional element is located, the better it is preserved in Korean agrammatism.     

Attentional resource and processing speed limitations during sentence processing in Parkinson's disease

Several studies have suggested that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have sentence comprehension difficulty in part because of their limited executive resources. However, these assessments confound the executive resources contributing to sentence comprehension with the resources needed for task performance. In the present study, we used a word detection technique that minimizes task demands in order to evaluate attentional and processing speed resources during the comprehension of simple sentences without subordinate clauses and sentences containing subject-relative and object-relative center-embedded subordinate clauses. We found that PD patients have poor sensitivity to phonetic errors embedded in unbound grammatical morphemes, regardless of the clausal structure of the sentence, suggesting difficulty attending to grammatical morphemes. We also found that PD patients are significantly slowed in their sensitivity to phonetic errors in content words embedded in object-relative center-embedded sentences. Slowed sensitivity to content words in object-relative sentences was correlated with timed executive measures of planning. On a traditional measure of comprehension, these PD patients were impaired for sentences containing object-relative center-embedded clauses compared to sentences with subject-relative center-embedded clauses, and comprehension of object-relative sentences was correlated with executive measures. Our findings are consistent with the claim that limited executive resources for strategic attention and processing speed contribute to the sentence comprehension difficulties of PD patients.     

Implementing ethics in the professions: Examples from environmental epidemiology

The need to integrate ethics into professional life, from the grassroots up, has been recognized, and a comprehensive ethics program has been proposed as a model. The model includes the four dimensions of: consensus building, ethics guidelines development and review, education, and implementation. The activities of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) are presented as examples and compared with the proposed model. Several innovative activities are described and incentives for ethical professional conduct are highlighted. The examples are provided for emulation by other professional organizations in the hope that, thereby, greater protection of the public interest will be achieved.     

Complicity in Thought and Language: Toleration of Wrong

Complicity as “toleration of wrong” is deeply rooted in Western language and narratives. It is based on assumptions about the self, our relationship to the world and personal accountability that differ from the Common Law's and moral theology's standard doctrines. How we blame others for “tolerating wrong” depends upon the moral force of public discourse and upon the meaning of censure as exhortation. Censure as blame is usually retrospective, while censure as exhortation is forward-looking and stresses moral maturity and flourishing.     

A Sociocognitive Analysis of Substance Abuse: An Agentic Perspective

This article presents a social-cognitive theory of substance abuse. The exercise of self-regulatory agency plays a central role in this approach. Perceived self-efficacy is the foundation of human agency. Unless people believe they can produce desired effects by their actions, they have little incentive to act. Self-efficacy beliefs promote desired changes through cognitive, motivational, affective, and choice processes. Perceived self-efficacy exerts its effects on every phase of personal change—the initiation of efforts to overcome substance abuse, achievement of desired changes, recovery from relapses, and long-term maintenance of a drug-free life. Assessments of perceived efficacy identify areas of vulnerability and provide guides for treatment. Substance abuse is a social problem, not just a personal one. Reducing substance abuse also requires policy initiatives and social remedies achieved through the exercise of collective efficacy.     

The Role of Perceived Barriers in Career Development: A Social Cognitive Perspective

Recent research has verified the claim that high school and college students perceive a variety of career-related barriers. Lent, Brown, and Hackett's (1994, 1996) social cognitive career theory and Weiner's (1979, 1985, 1986) attribution theory are useful approaches to increase understanding of the role that perceived barriers play in career development. This article presents a brief overview of the primary components of each theory as they relate to career-related barriers, discusses counseling implications associated with each approach, and provides ideas for future research to explore the utility of these theories in explaining career-related barriers.     

Source memory in Parkinson's disease

Three experiments (ns = 14 per group) are reported which investigated the ability of Parkinson patients to remember the characteristics of conditions under which a memory was acquired. In Exp. 1, subjects were required to indicate for each item in a recognition memory test whether it was spoken by Experimenter 1 or by Experimenter 2 (external-external source memory). In Exp. 2, subjects had to indicate for each item whether it was generated by themselves or by the experimenter (internal-external source memory). In Exp. 3, subjects had to judge whether an item was generated by themselves in saying or in thinking (internal-internal source memory). We found that patients with Parkinson's disease were not impaired in the previous two kinds of source memory (Exp. 1 and 2) but were impaired in internal-internal source memory (Exp. 3) relative to the age-matched control groups. In addition, both groups' performance could be improved when given distinctive cues, i.e., perceptual cues in Exp. 1 and different-domain cues in Exp. 2. These results suggest that the availability of cues was critical for Parkinson's disease in source memory. Finally, the result of Exp. 2 also showed generation effects for patients with Parkinson's disease. The generation effect refers to better memory of information by people when they had to produce it, e.g., producing associates to a word, compared with memory of information given to them.