Comprehension of legal contracts by non-experts: Effectiveness of plain language redrafting

The primary motivation behind the advocated use of plain language in legal documents is to increase comprehension among non-experts. We report empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of three kinds of simplification of standard legal contracts for increasing comprehension among naïve readers. A set of legal contracts was redrafted in three stages to produce three modified versions. In the first stage we removed or replaced archaic and redundant terms; in the next stage simplified words and sentence structure were introduced; in the final stage legal terms were defined or replaced with simpler terms. Comprehension, as measured by paraphrasing and question-answering tasks, was reliably enhanced by the use of simplified words and sentence structure, but absolute levels of comprehension were still very low. An examination of erroneous responses suggested that, quite apart from the constraints of language, non-experts have difficulty understanding complex legal concepts that sometimes conflict with prior knowledge and beliefs.     

Cognitive deficits related to major organ failure: The potential role of neuropsychological testing

Until recently, little attention has been paid to the possibility of cognitive deficits in patients with disease or failure of major organs such as the liver, kidney, or heart. However, there is a growing awareness that major organ failure often has neuropsychological sequelae. These sequelae may at times be quite subtle and not detectable under gross. examination. Nevertheless, even subtle deficits may have a major impact on adherence to medical regimens, psychosocial adjustment, and quality of life of patients. Neuropsychological assessment has a potentially valuable role to play both in research and in clinical work. It can be useful in adding to our knowledge of the cognitive effects of various types, severity and duration of major organ disease, as well as sequelae associated with treatment. It also is a potentially valuable clinical tool for identifying cognitive deficits that will affect the quality of life and probability of survival for organ failure patients.     

Representing AIDS

AIDS has contributed to changes in how our society constructs its image of death. In the early 1980s Philippe Ariès argued that death and the symbols surrounding it had been “relegated to the secret, private space of the home or the hospital.” With the coming of AIDS, death demands its place in the public mind - and eye. Many artists have devoted their talents to making AIDS visible. In doing so, they have resurrected many questions about sexuality and mortality. This paper discusses several examples of current AIDS art and places them in a wider cultural and historical context.     

Rights to privacy in research: adolescents versus parents

Conducting research on adolescents raises a number of ethical issues not often confronted in research on younger children. In part, these differences are due to the fact that although assent is usually not an issue, given cognitive and social competencies, the life situations and behavior of youth make it more difficult to balance rights and privacy of the adolescents. In this article, the three ethical principles of beneficence, justice, and respect for persons are discussed in terms of their application to the study of adolescents. Then, seven vignettes are presented to illustrate how these principles apply to real-life situations. How to balance the rights of adolescents and their parents is discussed, using adolescent girls and their parents for illustrative purposes.     

Rethinking women's ways of knowing: Gender commonalities and intersections with postformal thought

Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) identified five ways of knowing in women: silent, received, subjective, procedural, and constructed. This study examined the extent to which they were used by both women and men and their intersection with postformal, relativistic thought (Sinnott, 1989b). As listed, the ways of knowing fall along a continuum of increasingly complex thought; hence, overlap between constructed knowing and relativistic thought was expected. Thirty female and 30 male university students (aged 27 to 43 years) completed a structured interview about ways of knowing, solved two hypothetical everyday problems, and completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Age predicted neither ways of knowing nor relativistic thought; increasing education was predictive of relativistic thought but not constructed knowing. Neither women nor men relied on received knowing; women used subjective knowing more than men did, while the opposite was true for procedural knowing. While there were no gender differences in relativistic thought or constructed knowing, femininity was associated positively with both. Finally, procedural knowing decreased while constructed knowing increased with increasing evidence of relativistic thought.     

The proper placement of uniform connectedness

In this journal, Palmer and Rock (1994) articulated a principle of perceptual organization calleduniform connectedness (UC); and they contended that previous investigators of perception had failed to realize the need for this organizing principle. The authors outlined a theory of perceptual organization that “places the principle of UC at center stage” (p. 38) in that UC was assigned the two privileged roles of (1) forming the fundamental units for later perceptual processes, and (2) yielding the postconstancy regions that correspond to environmental surfaces. In this commentary, I argue that the proposed theory entails a serial ordering of perceptual processes that is inconsistent with current evidence regarding figure-ground organization, stereo fusion, and object recogntion. In addition, I point out that Kurt Koffka (1935) recognized the need for a principle of unit formation similar to the one proposed by Palmer and Rock.     

ESTABLISHMENT OF NONDELUSIONAL RESPONSES IN A SOCIALLY WITHDRAWN CHRONIC SCHIZOPHRENIC1

Multiple treatment interventions including instructions, modelling, timeout, avoidance of repetition, and reinforcement were successful in establishing factual answers to personal background questions in a withdrawn and socially unresponsive chronic schizophrenic. The subject had previously persisted in giving only delusional responses to these questions. A multiple-baseline design across verbal replies to personal background questions demonstrated that the changes in behavior were brought about by the treatment interventions. During baseline, the subject was reinforced for any response to four questions. The experimental interventions were then introduced for the first question and moved sequentially to an additional question when the subject's responses reached the criterion of at least 80% correct for two consecutive sessions. Introduction of the experimental interventions produced an increase from a baseline level of zero to at least 80% correct for each question. The use of the token reinforcement procedure was faded out after the subject was able to answer all four questions correctly at least 80% of the time for two consecutive sessions. Fading of the token reinforcement procedure was accomplished by using increasingly intermittent schedules of token reinforcement during the last seven sessions. In the final session, no tokens were used to reinforce the subject's responding. Nine-, ten-, and 12-month followup interviews were conducted to evaluate the maintenance of treatment gains. Maintenance was found to be complete at the nine- and 10-month followups, but at the 12-month followup interview, the subject answered one question incorrectly. This study replicates an investigation previously reported in this journal.