Physicians' values and physician-value neutrality

For years articles have decried the lack of empathy in physicians' relationships with patients. In addition to being empathetic, physicians are called upon to assume the posture of value neutrality, i.e., not imposing one's values when dealing with patients. Empathy is clearly an expression of deeply held values; even the language used to define it is value-laden. Physicians are consistently called upon to exhibit traits which are expressions of their underlying values. However, if proponents of value-neutrality are to be taken literally one must not impose any of one's values on one's patients. But then one wonders how empathy could ever be expressed; further, it is hard to imagine what a truly value neutral physician would be like. It is time we recognize that any relationship between two persons requires the expression of values from both parties. These values help shape that relationship and define its further history. Physicians are not excluded from this process just because they consider themselves professionals. Divulging personal values to patients is both more honest and more in keeping with the concepts of justice, beneficence, non maleficence, and autonomy than to feign value-neutrality. A presentation of some type statement of values is timely and would give patients an idea of where a physician stands on a myriad of issues. Rather than being value-neutral, value non-neutrality seems a more right and reasonable posture for physicians to assume.     

Judging a book by its cover: Interpretative effects of content on problem-solving transfer

We examine how cover stories of isomorphic problems affect transfer. Existing models posit that people retain content in problem representations and that similarities and differences between the “undeleted” cover stories might interfere with recognition of structural similarities.We propose that cover stories can affect transfer in another way—by inducing semantic knowledge that modifies problem structures. Two experiments examined how people represent and solve permutation problems dealing with random assignment of elements from one set to elements from another set. Although the problems were structurally isomorphic, cover stories involving different pairs of element sets led subjects to abstract different “interpreted structures.” Problems involving objects and people (e.g., prizes and students) led subjects to abstract an asymmetric structure (“get”) and problems involving similar sets of people (e.g., doctors and doctors) led subjects to abstract a symmetric structure (“pair”). Transfer was mediated by similarities and differences between the interpreted structures of the learned and the novel problems.     

A behavioral assessment scale for attention deficit disorder in brazilian children based on DSM-IIIR criteria

A teacher scale based on DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was developed for the behavioral assessment of children in Brazil. A total of 2, 082 children (782 males and 1,300 females) with a mean age of 11.2 years who were attending a public school in the greater Rio de Janeiro area were the subjects of this study. Two factors (Hyperactivity-Impulsivity and Inattention) were extracted from a principal-factor analysis conducted on the data, and the factor structure of the scale was found to be stable. Ratings of boys were higher than ratings of girls, and younger children had higher ratings than older children for both factors. Test-retest reliability for each item of the scale ranged from .56 to .70. The data are discussed in view of current controversies in the factor structure of teacher ratings of DSM-III-R ADHD symptoms.This research was supported by FINEP (42.88.0138.00) and FUNPENE. GNOB is the recipient of a CNPq Research Career Development Award (30.0197/82). RCAP was supported by a CNPq fellowship (82.2151/87). The authors are grateful to Rosely V. Magalhaes and Angela S. Guedes for assistance in data analysis with the SAS and SPSS packages. The authors wish to thank the school staff and teachers who participated in the study. This work was presented at the Fifteenth European Conference of the International Neuropsychological Society, Portugal, 1993.     

Frame multiplicity and policy fiascoes: Limits to explanation

The dynamics of intractability, frame multiplicity and intense controversy not only characterize policy formation struggles, as described by Schön and Rein, but also affect the evaluation of policies and government action. Policy analysts play an important part in the politics of policy evaluation. This article demonstrates that they tend to produce very different explanations for controversial, failing policies. Such differing explanations imply different causal attributions, different allocations of blame, and different lessons for future policy-making. Such differences are not random occurrences; they are embedded in the analytical frames that evaluators use to reconstruct policy processes and to explain their outcomes. It is shown that at least three deep-rooted frames can be reconstructed: fiascoes as failures of public problem solving, fiascoes as institutional imbalances, and fiascoes as system artefacts. One of the great epistemological challenges is how to deal with multiple analytical frames. The final part of the article discusses various strategies.     

Perception of relative pitch with different references: Some absolute-pitch listeners can’t tell musical interval names

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effect of absolute-pitch possession on relativepitch processing. Listeners attempted to identify melodic intervals ranging from a semitone to an octave with different reference tones. Listeners with absolute pitch showed declined performance when the reference was out-of-tune C, out-of-tune E, or F#, relative to when the reference was C. In contrast, listeners who had no absolute pitch maintained relatively high performance in all reference conditions. These results suggest that absolute-pitch listeners are weak in relative-pitch processing and show a tendency to rely on absolute pitch in relative-pitch tasks.     

Use of a computer-controlled firearms training simulator in perception response time experiments

This paper describes the use of a custom-configured computer-controlled firearms training simulator to measure perception response (reaction) time (RT) to a stimulus in which the degree of threat presented is a manipulable variable across trials. The computer records the number of frames of videotape traversed between the point of presentation of the threat in the video stimulus and the point at which the subject responds by drawing the firearm. For the purposes of data analysis, these frame-count measures are converted to RT measurements. Example data are presented that capture perception RT at both thedraw-stimulus and thefire-stimulus points in situations for which either only one threat or more than one threat exists. Other elements, such as degree of threat and accuracy of response, provide additional data.     

Mindless reading: Eye-movement characteristics are similar in scanning letter strings and reading texts

The purpose of the present study was to compare the oculomotor behavior of readers scanning meaningful and meaningless materials. Four conditions were used—a normal-text-reading control condition, and three experimental conditions in which the amount of linguistic processing was reduced, either by presenting the subjects with repeated letter strings or by asking the subjects to search for a target letter in texts or letter strings. The results show that global eye-movement characteristics (such as saccade size and fixation duration), as well as local characteristics (such as word-skipping rate, landing site, refixation probability, and refixation position), are very similar in the four conditions. The finding that the eyes are capable of generating an autonomous oculomotor scanning strategy in the absence of any linguistic information to process argues in favor of the idea that such predetermined oculomotor strategies might be an important determinant of eye movements in reading.     

Accreditation Standards for University and College Counseling Centers

The accreditation standards outlined in the article are used by the International Association of Counseling Services, Inc., as the basis for the formal accreditation of college and university counseling programs throughout the United States and Canada. They reflect the program elements and practice standards that are deemed essential in a counseling center that provides high-quality services to students.     

Perceived motion in structure from motion: Pointing responses to the axis of rotation

We investigated the ability to match finger orientation to the direction of the axis of rotation in structure-from-motion displays. Preliminary experiments verified that subjects could accurately use the index finger to report direction. The remainder of the experiments studied the perception of the axis of rotation from full rotations of a group of discrete points, the profiles of a rotating ellipsoid, and two views of a group of discrete points. Subjects’ responses were analyzed by decomposing the pointing responses into their slant and tilt components. Overall, the results indicated that subjects were sensitive to both slant and tilt. However, when the axis of rotation was near the viewing direction, subjects had difficulty reporting tilt with profiles and two views and showed a large bias in their slant judgments with two views and full rotations. These results are not entirely consistent with theoretical predictions. The results, particularly for two views, suggest that additional constraints are used by humans in the recovery of structure from motion.     

Visual slow brain potentials in children with attention deficit disorder

Using a two-stimulus reaction time paradigm, with two separate reward conditions (contingent and noncontingent), we compared slow wave brain potentials (ERPs) in 144 children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and 30 normal control children. This article reviews the findings during the 900 msec visual warning stimulus. As we had expected, based on ERP work of Forth and Hare (1989) and Raine, Venables and Williams (1990), and on previous work from our own laboratory, the group differences were found in the negative slow wave portions of the ERP complex during the contingent reward condition but not during the noncontingent condition. Aggressive hyperactive subjects with attention deficit disorder (ADDHA) were discriminated from nonaggressive subjects (including control subjects) during the contingent reward condition in the following ways: (1) greater fronto-central negativity (640–900 msec slow wave) and (2) greater right parietal than left parietal negativity (430–750 msec slow wave). All ADD subgroups, when compared to control (CONTR) subjects, showed greater slow wave negativity (700–900 msec) at the midline occipital electrode site during the contingent reward condition. This could be explained in part as an IQ effect on ERPs reflecting the IQ difference between the ADD subgroups and the controls. These slow wave findings seem to relate to attentional problems of these children. They are discussed in terms of a psychobiological model of inhibition/disinhibition and appetitive activation.