Legal briefing: Healthcare ethics committees

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving institutional healthcare ethics committees. This topic has been the subject of recent articles in JCE. Healthcare ethics committees have also recently been the subject of significant public policy attention. Disturbingly, Bobby Schindler and others have described ethics committees as "death panels." But most of the recent attention has been positive. Over the past several months, legislatures and courts have expanded the use of ethics committees and clarified their roles concerning both end-of-life treatment and other issues. These developments are usefully grouped into the following eight categories: 1. Existence and availability. 2. Membership and composition. 3. Operating procedures. 4. Advisory roles. 5. Decision-making and gate-keeping roles. 6. Confidentiality. 7. Immunity. 8. Litigation and court cases.     

Legal briefing: futile or non-beneficial treatment

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving futile or non-beneficial medical treatment. This topic has been the subject of recent articles in JCE. Indeed, it was the subject of a "Legal Briefing" in fall 2009. Accordingly, this column focuses on legal developments from the past two years. These developments are usefully grouped into the following 11 categories: 1. Texas Advance Directives Act, 2. Ontario Consent and Capacity Board, 3. Surrogate selection, 4. Ex post cases for damages, 5. Ex ante cases for injunctions, 6. Coercion and duress, 7. Assent and transparency, 8. Brain-death cases, 9. Criminal and administrative sanctions, 10. Conscientious objection, 11. Penalties for providing futile treatment.     

Safety in work vehicles: a multilevel study linking safety values and individual predictors to work-related driving crashes

Although work-related driving is associated with high accident rates, limited research has investigated the factors influencing driving crashes in the work setting. This study explored multilevel influences on self-reported crashes in the workplace by surveying a sample of work-related drivers (n = 380), their workgroup supervisors (n = 88), and fleet managers (n = 47). At the driver level of analysis, safety motivation predicted self-reported crashes. In turn, drivers' perceptions of their fleet managers' safety values (but not drivers' perceptions of their supervisors' safety values), their own attitudes, and their own efficacy beliefs predicted motivation to drive safely. Furthermore, the influence of supervisors and fleet managers interacted such that drivers were more motivated to drive safely if they perceived both their supervisor and fleet manager to value safety. This study also explored the cross-level relationships between supervisors' and fleet managers' perceptions of organizational safety values and drivers' perceptions of managerial safety values and found a relationship between fleet managers' perceptions of organizational safety values and drivers' perceptions of fleet managers' safety values. These results illustrate that perceptions of workplace safety values are transmitted across levels of the organization.     

Dimensions of response to novelty are associated with social engagement and aggression in adult male rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

In this study, the authors tested the hypothesis that behavioral response across social and nonsocial, novel and familiar conditions may be guided by the same trait(s) related to impulsivity in adult male rhesus macaques. The authors assessed 23 individuals' behavioral response to a series of nonsocial novel scenarios, as well as aggression and sociality within familiar and novel social contexts. Factor analysis of responses to nonsocial novelty identified two factors: Caution, which reflected latency to engage different novel situations, and Interest in Novelty, which consisted of duration and quality of exploration. Each dimension was associated with different social manifestations. Caution was negatively correlated with social aggression in novel and familiar social circumstances; Interest in Novelty was positively associated with social engagement in familiar, but not novel, social circumstances. The authors conclude that traits influencing impulsive response to novelty contribute to risky and normal social behavior across social contexts.     

What is presentism?

Presentism has received much scrutiny of late, yet little has been said of its definition. Many assume that it means simply that all that exists, exists at present. However, this definition will not do. It is defective in a multiplicity of ways. I consider and reject each of a number of intuitive ways in which to amend it. Each carries us a bit closer to our goal, but not until the end do we reach a definition that is wholly satisfactory. The final definition has this remarkable feature: it has us posit abstracta of two kinds, namely, times and haecceities.     

Situating social influence processes: dynamic, multidirectional flows of influence within social networks.

Social psychologists have studied the psychological processes involved in persuasion, conformity, and other forms of social influence, but they have rarely modeled the ways influence processes play out when multiple sources and multiple targets of influence interact over time. However, workers in other fields from sociology and economics to cognitive science and physics have recognized the importance of social influence and have developed models of influence flow in populations and groups-generally without relying on detailed social psychological findings. This article reviews models of social influence from a number of fields, categorizing them using four conceptual dimensions to delineate the universe of possible models. The goal is to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations to build models that incorporate the detailed, microlevel understanding of influence processes derived from focused laboratory studies but contextualized in ways that recognize how multidirectional, dynamic influences are situated in people's social networks and relationships.     

Rogers Redux: Relevance and Outcomes of Motivational Interviewing Across Behavioral Problems

Very little work regarding C. Rogers's (1961) client‐centered counseling has been published in the counseling discipline's journals over the last 20 years. However, during this time there has been an impressive output of empirical research using motivational interviewing (MI) in which C. Rogers's theory and approach are foundational. A review of MI's basic theoretical premises and applications for a multitude of behavioral problems are presented. Justification for integrating MI into counseling practice, training, and research is offered.     

The use of operant technology to measure behavioral priorities in captive animals

Addressing the behavioral priorities of captive animals and the development of practical, objective measures of the value of environmental resources is a principal objective of animal welfare science. In theory, consumer demand approaches derivedfrom human microeconomics should provide validmeasures of the value of environmental resources. In practice, however, a number of empirical and theoretical problems have rendered these measures difficult to interpret in studies with animals. A common approach has been to impose a cost on access to resources and to use time with each resource as a measure of consumption to construct demand curves. This can be recorded easily by automatic means, but in a number of studies, it has been found that animals compensate for increased cost of access with longer visit time. Furthermore, direct observation of the test animals’ behavior has shown that resource interaction is more intense once the animals have overcome higher costs. As a consequence, measures based on time with the resource may underestimate resource consumption at higher access costs, and demand curves derived from these measures may not be a true reflection of the value of different resources. An alternative approach to demand curves isreservation price, which is the maximum price individual animals are prepared to pay to gain access to resources. In studies using this approach, farmed mink (Mustela vison) paid higher prices for food and swimming water than for resources such as tunnels, water bowls, pet toys, and empty compartments. This indicates that the mink placed a higher value on food and swimming water than on other resources.