Religious themes in medical journals

The dialogue between medicine and religion has been expected to intensify. To test the degree of interaction empirically, the contents of four clinical medical journals for the years 1981 to 1991 were examined for reference to religious themes. Religion was important in 13 of 17,345 articles. Reasons proposed for this relative neglect are hostility, lack of interest, inadequate empirical studies, and the substitution of ethics and humanities as surrogates for religion. Scholars of religion are encouraged to submit relevant material to medical journals.     

Employee characteristics as predictors of turnover among female clerical employees in two organizations

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between employee characteristics and turnover in organizations. Female clerical employees (N = 314) in two regional offices of a large insurance company were administered Jackson's Personality Research Form (Jackson, D. Personality research form manual. Goshen, New York: Research Psychologists Press, 1967) and a questionnaire that included measures of several demographic characteristics. Turnover data were collected up to 8 months following administration of the questionnaire. Relationships were found between employee characteristics and turnover in both samples. Compared with stayers, leavers in both offices were characterized by lower tenure in the company, a higher need for autonomy, and a lower need for harm avoidance. These results held up under double cross-validation. Several suggestions were made concerning the direction of future research on turnover.     

Effects of encoding strategy on long-term memory for odours

The effects of various encoding tasks on long-term recognition of odours were examined. Different groups of subjects were instructed (a) to form visual images of the source of the odour, (b) to generate the name of the odour and provide a dictionary-like definition, or (c) to describe a life episode of which the odour reminded them. A no-strategy control was simply told to try to remember the odours for a subsequent recognition test. One week later, subjects performed a yes-no recognition test for the odours. The second and third groups displayed significantly higher recognition than the controls. The visual imagery group did not differ significantly from the control group. The results seem to be accounted for best by dual coding theory.     

TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGY: WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE?

Abstract. Teleological thinking permeates biology and is useful in pondering unanswered biological questions. Such thinking differs from the usual sense of teleology in that “purpose” in biology carries no imputation of causation. A few examples are given. The teleological system of biology is every bit as elegant a construct of the human mind as any other teleological system and in no way precludes spirituality. I argue that it provides a firmer foundation for moral guidance than supernatural systems.     

Effects of stimulus familiarity upon judged visual duration

Five experiments investigated the influence of the differences in stimulus familiarity among a dot-matrix letter, word, and nonword upon the relative judged duration of 30-msec flashes. Figure-ground contrast was manipulated by varying the number of dots comprising each display letter. With 30-msec presentations, judgments ranked subjective durations of the displays nonword > word > letter. Differences in judged duration among stimulus forms were greater when both forward and backward masking reduced recognition probability to chance level than when no mask was employed, and discriminations among masked presentations were easier for subjects. Figure-ground contrast influenced apparent duration judgments only as increases in figure-ground contrast contributed to clarity of familiarity differences among displays. The data were interpreted to indicate that differences in stimulus familiarity operate as early in visual processing as do differences in figure-ground contrast, with greater familiarity facilitating an automatic contact between a stimulus and its memory representation and therein reducing experienced duration.     

CURRENT TRENDS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MEDICINE

Abstract. The philosophy of medicine, a developing discipline, is defined as critical reflection on the activity of medicine. The clinical encounter is both its central aspect and the focus for philosophical analysis. The most systematic example of this discipline employs a mixture of empiricism and phenomenology. Systems thought presents an organizing schema by which the philosophy of medicine can move toward a more comprehensive and fundamental analysis of its own agenda, which includes four main topics: understanding the patient-physician interaction, concepts of health and disease, foundations of medical ethics, and the dialogue between medicine and the larger culture.